First-principle event reconstruction by time-charge readouts for TAO

Abstract

The Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO) is a liquid-scintillator satellite experiment of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) to measure the reference reactor neutrino spectrum with unprecedented energy resolution. We use inhomogeneous Poisson process and Tweedie generalized linear model (GLM) to characterize the detector response and the charge distribution of a SiPM. We develop a pure probabilistic model for time and charge of SiPMs from first principles to reconstruct point-like events in the TAO central detector. Thanks to our precise model and the high photo-coverage and quantum efficiency of the SiPM tiles at TAO, we achieve vertex position resolution better than \(20\,\hbox {mm}\), energy resolution of about \(2\%\) at \(1\,\hbox {MeV}\) and \(<0.5\%\) non-uniformity, marking the world’s best performance of liquid scintillator detectors. With such resolution, we perceive \(\hbox {MeV}\) events to exhibit track effects. It opens up an exciting possibility of computed tracking calorimeter for unsegmented liquid scintillator detector like TAO. Our methodology is applicable to other experiments that utilize PMTs for time and charge readouts.