Würzburg 2018 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 43: Neutrinophysik II

T 43.8: Talk

Tuesday, March 20, 2018, 18:25–18:40, Z6 - SR 2.012

A measurement of the thermal neutron capture on gadolinium with the ANNRI spectrometer at J-PARC — Pretam Kumar Das¹, Rohit Dir¹, William Focillon², Michel Gonin², Kaito Hagiwara¹, Hideo Harada³, Nobuyuki Iwamoto³, Tsubasa Kayano¹, Atsushi Kimura³, Yusuke Koshio¹, •Sebastian Lorenz^1,4, Takaaki Mori¹, Shoji Nakamura³, Iwa Ou¹, Makoto Sakuda¹, Mandeep Singh Reen¹, Takashi Sudo¹, Michael Wurm⁴, Tomoyuki Tanaka¹, Yoshiyuki Yamada¹, and Takatomi Yano⁵ — ¹Okayama University, Japan — ²École Polytechnique, France — ³Japan Atomic Energy Agency — ⁴Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany — ⁵Kobe University, Japan

Due to its high cross-section for thermal neutron capture and the succeeding emission of a γ cascade with a total energy of ∼8 MeV, gadolinium (Gd) is used in low-energy neutrino searches to increase the tagging efficiency for neutron capture signals from inverse beta decay reactions. Prominent examples are Daya Bay, Double Chooz and RENO, which use Gd-doped liquid scintillator. Since now also Super-Kamiokande plans to dissolve Gd in its water target, a precise modeling of the γ ray cascade from the Gd(n,γ) reaction is important to study neutron tagging efficiencies in MC simulations. However, existing MC frameworks do not reproduce the capture reaction in detail when compared to experimental outcomes. Using the ANNRI germanium spectrometer at J-PARC, the thermal neutron capture on enriched ¹⁵⁷Gd has been measured and the data are used to build a corresponding model. This talk presents results of the ANNRI-Gd experiment.