Design and characterization of a photosensor system for the RELICS experiment
Abstract
In this paper, we present the design and characterization of a photosensor system developed for the RELICS experiment. An extended dynamic range base was designed to mitigate photomultiplier tube (PMT) saturation caused by intense cosmic muon backgrounds in the surface-level RELICS detector. The system employs dual readout from the anode and the seventh dynode to extend the linear response range of the PMT. In particular, our characterization and measurements of Hamamatsu R8520-406 PMTs confirm stable operation under positive high-voltage bias, extending the linear response range by more than an order of magnitude. Furthermore, a model of PMT saturation and recovery was developed to evaluate the influence of cosmic muon signals in the RELICS detector. The results demonstrate the system capability to detect coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering signals under surface-level cosmic backgrounds, and suggest the potential to extend the scientific reach of RELICS to MeV-scale interactions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.24196,
title = {Design and characterization of a photosensor system for the RELICS experiment},
author = {Jijun Yang and Ruize Li and Chang Cai and Guocai Chen and Jiangyu Chen and Huayu Dai and Rundong Fang and Fei Gao and Jingfan Gu and Xiaoran Guo and Jiheng Guo and Gaojun Jin and Fali Ju and Yanzhou Hao and Yang Lei and Kaihang Li and Meng Li and Minhua Li and Shengchao Li and Siyin Li and Tao Li and Qing Lin and Jiajun Liu and Sheng Lv and Guang Luo and Kangwei Ni and Chuanping Shen and Mingzhuo Song and Lijun Tong and Jun Wang and Xiaoyu Wang and Wei Wang and Xiaoping Wang and Zihu Wang and Yuehuan Wei and Liming Weng and Xiang Xiao and Lingfeng Xie and Litao Yang and Long Yang and Jingqiang Ye and Jiachen Yu and Qian Yue and Yuyong Yue and Bingwei Zhang and Yuming Zhang and Yifei Zhao and Chenhui Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.24196},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
19 pages, 13 figures. v3: updated to address the referees' comments, fixed author list typo. Journal reference added