Data Quality and Run Selection for the SNO+ experiment

Abstract

The SNO+ detector main physics goal is the search for neutrinoless double-beta decay, a rare process which if detected, will prove the Majorana nature of the neutrinos and provide information on the absolute scale of the neutrino absolute mass. Additional physics goals of SNO+ include the study of solar neutrinos, anti-neutrinos from nuclear reactors and the Earth’s natural radioactivity as well as Supernovae neutrinos. Located in the SNOLAB underground physics laboratory (Canada), it will re-use the SNO experiment infrastructure with the 12 m diameter spherical volume filled with 780 tons of Te-loaded liquid scintillator. A short phase with the detector completely filled with water has started at the end of 2016. It will be followed by a scintillator phase expected to start at the end of this year. Continual careful monitoring of the detector state such as its hardware configuration, slow control information, data handling and triggers is required to ensure the quality of the data taken. Several automatic checks have been put in place for that purpose. This information serves as input to higher level run selection tools that will ultimately perform a final decision on the goodness of a run for a given physics analysis.