An aboveground 60-kg reactor-antineutrino detector prototype, comprised of a 2-dimensional array of 36 6Li-doped pulse shape sensitive plastic scintillator bars, is described. Each bar is 50~cm long with a square cross section of 5.5~cm. Doped with 6Li at 0.1\% by mass, the detector is capable of identifying correlated energy depositions for the detection of reactor antineutrinos via the inverse-beta-decay reaction. Each bar is wrapped with a specular reflector that directs photons towards PMTs mounted at both ends of the bar. This paper highlights the construction, key features, and main performance characteristics of the system. The system, which relies on multiple observables such as PSD, energy, position, and timing, is capable of detecting IBD-like neutron-correlated backgrounds, long-lived decay chains, and cosmogenic isotopes.
@article{arxiv.2505.05696,
title = {A prototype reactor-antineutrino detector based on $^6$Li-doped pulse-shaping-discriminating plastic scintillator},
author = {O. Benevides Rodrigues and E. P. Bernard and N. S. Bowden and C. Bravo and R. Carr and T. M. Classen and A. J. Conant and S. A. Dazeley and M. T. Dunbrack and S. R. Durham and A. S. Erickson and A. Haghighat and K. M. Heeger and P. Huber and A. Irani and O. Kyzylova and V. A. Li and J. M. Link and B. R. Littlejohn and F. Machado and M. P. Mendenhall and H. P. Mumm and J. Newby and C. Roca and J. Ross and F. Sutanto and K. Walkup and J. Wilhelmi and X. Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.05696},
year = {2025}
}