SNO+

Abstract:

SNO+ is a large liquid scintillator-based experiment located 2km underground at SNOLAB, Sudbury, Canada. It reuses the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory detector, consisting of a 12m diameter acrylic vessel which will be filled with about 780 tonnes of ultra-pure liquid scintillator. Designed as a multipurpose neutrino experiment, the primary goal of SNO+ is a search for the neutrinoless double-beta decay (0$\nu\beta\beta$) of 130Te. In Phase I, the detector will be loaded with 0.3% natural tellurium, corresponding to nearly 800 kg of 130Te, with an expected effective Majorana neutrino mass sensitivity in the region of 55-133 meV, just above the inverted mass hierarchy. Recently, the possibility of deploying up to ten times more natural tellurium has been investigated, which would enable SNO+ to achieve sensitivity deep into the parameter space for the inverted neutrino mass hierarchy in the future. Additionally, SNO+ aims to measure reactor antineutrino oscillations, low-energy solar neutrinos, and geoneutrinos, to be sensitive to supernova neutrinos, and to search for exotic physics. A first phase with the detector filled with water will begin soon, with the scintillator phase expected to start after a few months of water data taking. The 0$\nu\beta\beta$ Phase I is foreseen for 2017.

Abstract:

This paper demonstrates a novel method to extract photomultiplier tube (PMT) calibration timing constants in large liquid scintillation detectors from physics data using the machinery of unsupervised deep learning. The approach uses a simplified physical model of optical photon transport in the loss function, with PMT calibration constants treated as free parameters, and the simple assumption that individual events represent point-like emission. The problem is, thus, effectively reduced to that of regression on a very large scale, made tractable by deep learning architectures and automatic differentiation frameworks. Using data from the 9300 PMTs in the SNO+ detector, the method has been shown to reliably extract 3 calibration constants for each of the over 7500 online PMTs using radioactive background events. We believe that this basic approach can be straightforwardly generalized for a wide range of applications.

Abstract:

The SNO+ Collaboration reports new results on reactor antineutrino oscillations using data acquired from May 2022 through July 2025. The spectral analysis of a flux dominated by nuclear reactors at 240, 340, and 350 km yields the mass-squared difference $\mathrm{\Delta }{m}_{21}^2=(7.91_{-0.25}^{+0.22})\times {10}^{-5}{\mathrm{eV}}^2$ . This result is compatible with and approaches the precision of the only other long-baseline reactor antineutrino measurement, by KamLAND. Combining these measurements, along with those from solar neutrino experiments, the global values of the neutrino mixing parameters become $\mathrm{\Delta }{m}_{21}^2=(7.59\pm 0.17)\times {10}^{-5}{\mathrm{eV}}^2$ and ${\sin }^2{\theta }_{12}=0.310\pm 0.012$ . The analysis of geoneutrinos at $\mathrm{SNO}+$ is also improved, with a measured signal of ${48}_{-12}^{+14}$ TNU.