Constraining the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background with SK-Gd

研究方案的主要目的是提高现有和未来水切伦科夫探测器的能力（特别是现有的超级神冈实验和计划中的超级神冈实验）。这项研究有两个主要主题。第一个是由牛津大学和卢瑟福实验室提出的开发现有光电探测器变体的硬件/软件项目。这些新的光电探测器将由光电倍增管和附加的波长移动塑料板组成。这是一种已经在该领域使用的技术，但新的建议是改变WS板的几何形状，以优化最终系统的定时响应。我们相信，这将产生一种比现有光电倍增管更便宜的替代方案，可用于增强超神冈实验的低能量物理。该项目将包括设计、建造和测试这些新探测器的第一个工作原型。主要目的是证明一个具有足够高的光子探测效率和良好的时序的经济有效的装置可以被建造。这项研究将与英国和国外的一些大学合作进行，可能的结果是开发一种新型的波长移动塑料（因为现有的替代品似乎不必要的昂贵），可以授权给一家英国公司生产。研究项目的第二个主题将是利用超级神冈新增加的中子探测能力来提高对振荡或质子衰变的物理灵敏度（增强的中子探测能力将有助于抑制质子衰变搜索的背景，并通过在振荡搜索中实现中微子与反中微子事件的统计分离）。这将主要是一个软件分析任务，也将与其他大学小组合作执行。

The main aim of the research programme will be enhancing the capability of existing and future water Cerenkov detectors (in particular the existing Super Kamiokande experiment and the planned Hyper Kamiokande experiment). There are two principle themes of the research. The first is a hardware/software project to develop a variant of existing photodetectors proposed by Oxford and the Rutherford Lab. These new photodetectors will consist of photomultipliers with attached wavelength shifting plastic plates. This is a technique already used in the field, but the new proposal is to alter the geometry of the WS plates to optimize the timing response of the resulting system. We believe this will produce a cheaper alternative to existing photomultiplier options that could be used to enhance the low-energy physics of the Hyper Kamiokande experiment. The project will consist of designing, building, and testing the first working prototypes of these new detectors. The main aim is to demonstrate that a cost-effective device can be built with high enough photon detection efficiency and good timing. This will be done in collaboration with a number of UK and foreign universities, and a possible outgrowth would be to develop a new type of wavelength-shifting plastic (because the existing alternatives seem unnecessarily expensive) which could be licensed to a UK firm to produce. The second theme of the research project will be to use the newly added neutron-detection capability of Super Kamiokande to improve the physics sensitivity to oscillations or proton decay (enhanced neutron-detection capability will help both by suppressing background in proton decay searches and by enabling statistical separation of neutrino from anti-neutrino events in oscillation searches). This will be primarily a software analysis task, also performed in collaboration with other university groups.