Journal Article

Radioactivity control strategy for the JUNO detector

Sun, Shifeng, Wang, Yifang, Yi, Peihuai, Gong, Hui, Montini, Paolo, Li, Tao, Joutsenvaara, Jari, Sogo-Bezerra, Thiago, Fan, Lei, Wu, Qun, Xu, Benda, Liu, Hui, Li, Ruhui, Rebii, Abdel, Zhang, Yiyu, Previtali, Ezio, Bellato, Marco, Chen, Po-An, Mao, Yajun, Caruso, Rossella, Wu, Fangliang, Hor, YuenKeung, Huo, Lei, Ma, Qiumei, Chang, Yun, Aiello, Sebastiano, van Waasen, Stefan, Sreethawong, Warintorn, Ling, Jiajie, Liu, Jianglai, Miramonti, Lino, Deng, Zhi, Vanroyen, Guillaume, Zhang, Peng, Hu, Zhuojun, Leitner, Rupert, Yasin, Zafar, Li, Xiaomei, Dal Corso, Flavio, Piñeres Rico, Luis Felipe, Roche, Mathieu, Votano, Lucia, De La Taille, Christophe, Othegraven, Rainer, Zhang, Jingbo, Vollbrecht, Moritz Cornelius, Jiang, Di, Wang, Zhe, Yu, Zeyuan, Chukanov, Artem, Schwab, Cédric, Songwadhana, Julanan, Liu, Hongbang, Zhang, Xuantong, Wei, Lianghong, Bordereau, Clément, Luo, Guang, Pilarczyk, Oliver, Zhang, Aiqiang, Sirignano, Chiara, Cai, Xiao, Fang, Jian, Han, Ran, Dmitrievsky, Sergey, Yang, Huan, Ren, Bin, Bongrand, Mathieu, Liebau, Daniel, Gan, Haonan, Manzali, Francesco, Ochoa-Ricoux, Juan Pedro, Soonthornthum, Boonrucksar, Fourn

2021

Overview

A bstract JUNO is a massive liquid scintillator detector with a primary scientific goal of determining the neutrino mass ordering by studying the oscillated anti-neutrino flux coming from two nuclear power plants at 53 km distance. The expected signal anti-neutrino interaction rate is only 60 counts per day (cpd), therefore a careful control of the background sources due to radioactivity is critical. In particular, natural radioactivity present in all materials and in the environment represents a serious issue that could impair the sensitivity of the experiment if appropriate countermeasures were not foreseen. In this paper we discuss the background reduction strategies undertaken by the JUNO collaboration to reduce at minimum the impact of natural radioactivity. We describe our efforts for an optimized experimental design, a careful material screening and accurate detector production handling, and a constant control of the expected results through a meticulous Monte Carlo simulation program. We show that all these actions should allow us to keep the background count rate safely below the target value of 10 Hz (i.e. ∼ 1 cpd accidental background) in the default fiducial volume, above an energy threshold of 0.7 MeV.

• Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg,Springer Nature B.V,Springer,SpringerOpen
• Subject: Classical and Quantum Gravitation / Design of experiments / Design optimization / Elementary Particles / High energy physics / High Energy Physics - Experiment / Materials handling / Monte Carlo simulation / Natural radioactivity / Neutrino Detectors and Telescopes (experiments) / Neutrinos / Nuclear power plants / Physics / Physics and Astronomy / Quantum Field Theories / Quantum Field Theory / Quantum Physics / Regular Article - Experimental Physics / Relativity Theory / Scintillation counters / Sensors / String Theory