"This provides a large volume for particles coming in to interact and produce light," Christine Kraus explained. At the time of the experiment, it was filled with ultra-pure water. The SNO+ detector is a large acrylic vessel, measuring 12m in diameter. The detector also has the lowest reported rates of background-inducing muons from the atmosphere among water Cherenkov detectors, which significantly improved the team's chances of detecting antineutrinos.
Given that the SNO+ detector has a good enough sensitivity to measure reactor antineutrinos with a liquid scintillator, the SNO+ collaboration set out to explore the possibility that antineutrinos could also be observed using water. Prior to this, the collaboration filled the detector with water to calibrate detector components and characterize intrinsic radioactive backgrounds." "With the detector currently filled with scintillator, SNO+ is also measuring the neutrino mass splitting 𝚫 m 2 21 using reactor antineutrinos. "The primary goal of the SNO+ experiment is to conduct a high-sensitivity search for neutrinoless double beta decay using a tellurium-loaded liquid scintillator," Logan Lebanowski told on behalf of the SNO+ collaboration. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, could pave the way for new antineutrino searches using water Cherenkov detectors. The SNO+ experiment, a large-scale research effort collecting data using the multipurpose particle detector at SNOLAB, recently gathered the first evidence of reactor antineutrinos inside a water Cherenkov detector (i.e., a type of particle detector that detects radiation and reconstructs information about particles). This is a signal produced during nuclear reactions, which involve an electron antineutrino with a proton, producing a positron and a neutron. Neutrinos produced in nuclear reactors are detected through the so-called inverse beta decay (IBD).
As neutrinos hardly interact with other particles, they are generally hard to detect. These efforts led to significant physics discoveries, from the first detection of neutrinos in the late 1950s to recent measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters.
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