Silicon Photomultipliers for the decay tunnel instrumentation of the ENUBET neutrino beam

Abstract

The goal of the ENUBET project is to demonstrate that a precision of ∼1% on measurement of the absolute neutrino cross section at GeV scale can be achieved by monitoring the positron production in the decay tunnel coming from the three-body semileptonic decays of kaons. The baseline option for the tunnel instrumentation employs a fine-grained shashlik calorimeter with a 4.3 X0 longitudinal segmentation to separate positrons and pions coming from other decay modes of kaons. The system is complemented by rings of plastic scintillator doublets below the calorimeter acting as a photon veto to suppress the π0 background and to provide timing informations. SiPMs instrumenting the detector will be exposed to sizeble amounts of neutrons arising in hadronic showers. In order to reproduce such a working environment, SiPMs with different cell size (from 12 to 20 μm) were irradiated at the INFN-LNL CN Van Der Graaf with neutron fluences up to 2×1011 n/cm2 (1 MeV-eq.). The exposed light sensors were characterized in terms of I–V curves at different irradiation levels, and their response tested by exposing a prototype on beam at CERN. In this contribution we will report the results of the described tests on SiPMs, together with the advances in their integration with the ENUBET detectors.