Enhancing Angular Sensitivity of Segmented Antineutrino Detectors for Reactor Monitoring Applications
Abstract
We present a potential improvement over the standard method developed to determine antineutrino directionality in inverse-beta-decay detectors. The previously developed method for quantifying directionality in monolithic and segmented detectors may be ambiguous in methodology. In this paper, we present a new directionality algorithm and include error analysis. We have developed a new algorithm based on a measure of ``distance'' between two matrices. We report findings for our research in reactor-antineutrino directionality, and emphasize that the algorithm has broad applications whenever one desires computationally efficient 2D pattern-matching. We treat data from detector segments in the form of a matrix. The validation of our algorithm boils down to comparing a Monte Carlo generated ``empirical'' data set to a simulated data set. The empirical data set is generated for a particular orientation of the neutrino beam. We identify an optimal segmentation scale in the low-count regime. We also discuss the shortcomings of the conventional method and how this knowledge can be applied to segmented detectors, hybrid designs, and generalized validation, agnostic to the physics of detector design.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.03561,
title = {Enhancing Angular Sensitivity of Segmented Antineutrino Detectors for Reactor Monitoring Applications},
author = {Brian C. Crow and Max A. A. Dornfest and John G. Learned and Jackson D. Seligman and Nathan S. Sibert and Jeffrey G. Yepez and Viacheslav A. Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.03561},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
16 pages, 24 figures, submitted to Phys Rev Applied, analysis code: https://github.com/jgyepez/neutrino-directionality