Abstract
Atmospheric neutrinos are one of the most relevant natural neutrino sources that can be exploited to infer properties about cosmic rays and neutrino oscillations. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) experiment, a 20 kton liquid scintillator detector with excellent energy resolution is currently under construction in China. JUNO will be able to detect several atmospheric neutrinos per day given the large volume. A study on the JUNO detection and reconstruction capabilities of atmospheric nu _e and nu _mu fluxes is presented in this paper. In this study, a sample of atmospheric neutrino Monte Carlo events has been generated, starting from theoretical models, and then processed by the detector simulation. The excellent timing resolution of the 3” PMT light detection system of JUNO detector and the much higher light yield for scintillation over Cherenkov allow to measure the time structure of the scintillation light with very high precision. Since nu _e and nu _mu interactions produce a slightly different light pattern, the different time evolution of light allows to discriminate the flavor of primary neutrinos. A probabilistic unfolding method has been used, in order to infer the primary neutrino energy spectrum from the detector experimental observables. The simulated spectrum has been reconstructed between 100 MeV and 10 GeV, showing a great potential of the detector in the atmospheric low energy region.
Highlights
Atmospheric neutrinos are a naturally occurring neutrino source
We investigate Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)’s potential for measuring the atmospheric νe and νμ fluxes in the energy range 100 MeV–10 GeV
JUNO’s design is not optimized for atmospheric neutrino physics, the extremely good performances in the atmospheric neutrino energy reconstruction can be fully exploited for the measurement of the energy spectrum
Summary
Atmospheric neutrinos are a naturally occurring neutrino source. They originate from the decays of π and K produced in extensive air showers initiated by the interaction of cosmic rays with the Earth’s atmosphere [1,2,3,4]. C (2021) 81:887 ited ability of JUNO in tracking single particles after a neutrino interaction, with respect to large Cherenkov detectors, and a slightly reduced accessible statistics, the LS nature of the detector allows more precise measurements towards the low energy region This sector of the energy spectrum is still not fully covered by present and past experiments. Measurements performed over the last decades, up to present times, are able to cover a very wide range in the neutrino energy, from several hundreds of MeV to several hundreds of TeV This sector has been explored predominantly by Cherenkov detectors, such as Super-Kamiokande [7] and IceCube [8,9,10,24].
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