The extended Water-based Liquid Scintillator Program for ANNIE: Topological Event Reconstruction and Tracking in a Hybrid Detector

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Caren Hagner
• Subject Area: Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Fields
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 456139317

ANNIE (Accelerator Neutrino Nucleon Interaction Experiment) is located in the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at Fermi National Lab. Thus, it is ideally suited for a multi-ton-scale application of the Water-based Liquid Scintillator (WbLS) technique. ANNIE permits a high-statistics study of GeV neutrino events from the BNB, the order of 10^4 events per year and ton of detector material are expected. In the current phase, the collaboration deployed the Gd-loaded water Cherenkov detector with an inner vessel filled with WbLS, called SANDI (Scintillator for Annie Neutrino Detection Improvement). For the next phase of the experiment, a full-scale deployment of ANNIE with WbLS is foreseen. This offers a unique chance to demonstrate the full potential of GeV neutrino detection in WbLS, making use of a separation between Cherenkov and scintillation signals. In recent years, we have developed an advanced event reconstruction method in liquid scintillators making use of the topological features of the scintillation light. The main goal of this project is to include the information from the Cherenkov light in this topological track reconstruction (TTR) and thus to improve and extend its performance, in particular in the GeV regime. Furthermore, we will build and operate an external tracking detector. This will enable us to verify track reconstruction in ANNIE using independently measured tracks of a muon sample.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Daniel Bick