Improving the Energy Resolution of the Reactor Antineutrino Energy Reconstruction with Positron Direction

The energy resolution is crucial for the reactor neutrino experiments which aims to determine neutrino mass ordering by precise measurement of the reactor antineutrino energy spectrum. A non-negligible effect in the antineutrino energy resolution is the spread of the kinetic energy of the recoiled neutron and the corresponding positron when detecting the antineutrinos via Inverse Beta-Decay (IBD) reaction. The emission direction of the produced positron in IBD reaction can be used to estimate the kinetic energy of neutron and thus the reconstructed antineutrino energy resolution can be improved. To demonstrate the feasibility, a simple positron direction reconstruction method is implemented in a toy liquid scintillator detector like the Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO) with 4500 photoelectron yield per MeV. A 4% to 26% improvement of energy resolution can be achieved for 5 MeV reactor antineutrinos at TAO.

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