High Energy Neutrino Analysis at KamLAND and Application to Dark Matter Search

by Mr Michinari Sakai (University of Hawaii)

Thursday Mar 10, 2016, 1:15 PM → 3:15 PM Pacific/Honolulu

420 (Watanabe Hall)

There are currently two active detector technologies for neutrino detection, namely Cherenkov and scintillator detectors. In the past, scintillator detectors have traditionally been used much like calorimeters to analyze neutrinos at lower energies of ~MeV, whereas neutrino directionality and flavor discrimination at higher energy scales have been greatly pursued by Cherenkov detectors. In this talk, we will introduce a novel analysis technique to resolve directionality of GeV scale neutrinos in scintillator with data taken at KamLAND, the world's largest scintillator neutrino detector located in Kamioka, Japan. Studies suggest that the directional resolution using this new method may be better than that of the Cherenkov method by ~10 degrees in this energy regime. We will also explore track reconstruction and flavor discrimination techniques that were initially developed for R&D in the LENA project, and apply these techniques for the first time using real data. Finally we will employ the presented method to conduct an indirect dark matter search by looking for neutrinos originating from dark matter annihilation in the Sun and Earth.