Mineral oil tests for the MiniBooNE detector

Abstract

The MiniBooNE experiment will unambiguously confirm or refute the existence of the neutrino oscillation signal seen by the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) Experiment at Los Alamos National Laboratory. MiniBooNE will search for the appearance of electron neutrinos in a beam of muon neutrinos. The MiniBooNE detector is a 12 m diameter sphere filled with mineral oil and instrumented with photomultiplier tubes. The properties of the mineral oil chosen to fill this Cerenkov detector will be important to the experiment. The production of scintillation light in the oil, the attenuation of light across the detector, and the index of refraction of the oil are all important properties that must be known in order to properly model the detector. Fluorescence of the oil, optical dispersion, and oil density are also important quantities.