English

A New Model of Intranuclear Neutron-Antineutron Transformations in ${}^{16}_{8}$O

High Energy Physics - Experiment 2022-06-15 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Nuclear Theory

Abstract

There has been much work in recent years pertaining to viability studies for the intranuclear observation of neutron-antineutron transformations. These studies begin firstly with the design and implementation of an event generator for the simulation of this rare process, where one hopes to retain as much of the underlying nuclear physics as possible in the initial state, and then studying how these effects may perturb the final state observable particles for detector efficiency studies following simulated reconstruction. There have been several searches for intranuclear neutron-antineutron transformations, primarily utilizing the 816{}^{16}_{8}O nucleus, and completed within large underground water Cherenkov detectors such as Super-Kamiokande. The latest iteration of a generator is presented here for use in such an experiment. This generator includes several new features, including a new radial (position) annihilation probability distribution and related intranuclear suppression factor for 816{}^{16}_{8}O, as well as a highly general, modern nuclear multifragmentation model with photonic de-excitations. The latter of these may allow for improved identification of the signal using large underground detectors such as Super-Kamiokande and the future Hyper-Kamiokande, potentially increasing the overall signal efficiencies of these rare searches. However, it should be noted that certain fast photonic de-excitations may be washed out by π0\pi^0 decays to photons. These new features implemented in these nˉ\bar{n}\isotope[15][8]{O} simulations increase the overall physical realism of the model, and are easily portable to other future searches such as to extranuclear nˉ612\bar{n}{}^{12}_{6}C for the ESS NNBAR experiment, as well as intranuclear nˉ1839\bar{n}{}^{39}_{18}Ar used in DUNE.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.10478,
  title  = {A New Model of Intranuclear Neutron-Antineutron Transformations in ${}^{16}_{8}$O},
  author = {J. L. Barrow and A. S. Botvina and E. S. Golubeva and J-M. Richard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.10478},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

16 pages, 12 figures