J
jeremy
47 minutes
Water Cherenkov Neutrino Detectors and Super-Kamiokande
Large underground tanks of ultra-pure water instrumented with photomultiplier tubes that detect neutrino interactions by the Cherenkov light emitted when a charged reaction product travels faster than light does in water. Covers the Cherenkov mechanism and its threshold, why the light forms a cone that projects onto the detector wall as a ring, and how the ring's pattern and sharpness encode the particle's type, direction, and energy. The canonical example is Super-Kamiokande, a 50-kiloton detector under a mountain in Japan that serves both as a standalone atmospheric- and solar-neutrino observatory and as the far detector of the T2K beam. This is the instrument whose response and mis-modeling the systematic-uncertainty analysis characterizes.