Oct. 1, 2019
Abstract: Production of neutrons in neutrino interactions is a complicated process not very well understood. Our knowledge of neutrino cross-sections is limited at GeV energies, resulting in large uncertainties in hadron production, which are not typically measured by neutrino beam experiments. A better understanding of neutron production is needed to develop neutron tagging techniques for nucleon decay searches, to enable neutrino and anti-neutrino separation in atmospheric neutrino experiments and to design more precise neutrino energy reconstruction algorithms for next generation detectors. The SNO experiment presents unique features for this study, namely: low cosmics rate and large neutron detection efficiency. We present a measurement of the neutron production in atmospheric neutrino interactions in a mixture of light and heavy water as a function of different observables, and compare a model using GENIE and GEANT4. Potentials of neutron tagging techniques and neutrino and anti-neutrino separation are also discussed in the context of atmospheric neutrino detectors
