The Mercedes water Cherenkov detector

Gadolinium study for a water Cherenkov detector

Modification of large water Cherenkov detectors by addition of gadolinium has been proposed. The large cross section for neutron capture on Gd will greatly improve the sensitivity to antielectron neutrinos from supernovae and reactors. A five-year project to build and develop a prototype detector based on Super-Kamiokande (SK) has started. We are performing various studies, including a material...

Feasibility of a Next Generation Underground Water Cherenkov Detector: UNO

The feasibility of a next generation underground water Cherenkov detector is examined and a conceptual design (UNO) is presented. The design has a linear detector configuration with a total volume of 650 kton which is 13 times the total volume of the Super-Kamiokande detector. It corresponds to a 20 times increase in fiducial volume for physics analyses. The physics goals of UNO are to increase...

1 Multi - Megaton Water Cherenkov Detector for a Proton Decay

The discovery of the neutrino oscillations in 1998 revisited the interest of proton decay search [2]. The existence of the tiny neutrino mass indicates the existence of the large energy scale behind and suggests the connection between the small neutrino mass and proton decay. There are strong indications of the unification scale of O(10 16)GeV: the running coupling constants with super-symmetri...

First Study of Neutron Tagging with a Water Cherenkov Detector

A first study of neutron tagging is conducted in Super–Kamiokande, a 50,000-ton water Cherenkov detector. The tagging efficiencies of thermal neutrons are evaluated in a 0.2 % GdCl3-water solution and pure water. They are determined to be, respectively, 66.7 % for events above 3 MeV and 20 % with corresponding background probabilities of 2 × 10 and 3 × 10. This newly developed technique may ena...

Callibration of a homemade 4-fold Water Cherenkov Detector array, by detection of EAS events