Speaker
Description
The SNO+ experiment is a kilo tonne-scale liquid scintillator neutrino detector located 2 km underground at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Ontario. Within its broad physics program, SNO+ detects anti-neutrinos through an inverse beta decay (IBD) reaction, producing a characteristic delayed-coincidence signal that can be easily separated from most backgrounds. This allows SNO+ to make two key measurements: the determination of a subset of neutrino mixing parameters from reactor anti-neutrino oscillations, and the flux of geo-neutrinos emitted from the decay of unstable elements in the Earth. The SNO+ collaboration has recently released improved measurements for both.
An important component of the improved anti-neutrino analysis was the use of a deployed $^{241}$Am-$^{9}$Be neutron calibration source, which produces a delayed-coincidence signal similar to IBD interactions. The calibration campaign was used to validate our understanding of the detector response to this type of event. This, in turn, enabled the first-time use of a novel analysis technique to distinguish IBD events from a class of background delayed-coincidence events caused by neutrons produced by $(\alpha,n)$ reactions within the detector. This talk will summarize these recent results and highlight the role of the calibration campaign in enabling this improved analysis.
| Your current academic level | PhD student |
|---|---|
| Your email address | 15ama17@queensu.ca |
| Affiliation | Queen's University |
| Supervisor name | Alexander J. Wright |
| Supervisor email | awright@queensu.ca |
