Coincidence-based reconstruction for reactor antineutrino detection in gadolinium-doped Cherenkov detectors

A reconstruction algorithm has been developed to capitalize on advances in Cherenkov technology for reactor antineutrino detection. Large gadolinium-doped water (Gd-H2O) Cherenkov detectors are a developing technology which use Gd loading to increase the visibility of the neutrons produced in inverse beta decay (IBD) interactions, which produce positron–neutron pairs coincident in time and space. In this paper, we describe the reconstruction which uses the combined light from both events in an IBD pair to accurately reconstruct the interaction vertex. Using simulation, the algorithm has been applied to the reconstruction of reactor antineutrinos in GdH2O and in Gd-doped water-based liquid scintillator (Gd-WbLS), an advanced detector medium which is also currently in development. Compared to a single-event reconstruction, the combined reconstruction improves vertex resolution for reactor IBD positrons by up to a factor of 4.5 at the lowest energies. IBD-neutron vertex resolution was found to improve by more than 30% in most instances. Powerful background rejection with the coincidence reconstruction can be achieved by requiring a minimum quality of fit. This was found to reject up to 94% of accidental coincidences of uncorrelated background events, while retaining at least 97.5% of the IBD signal pairs.