2As part of the European LAGUNA design study on a next-generation neutrino detector, we propose the liquid-scintillator detector LENA (Low Energy Neutrino Astronomy) as a multipurpose neutrino observatory. The outstanding successes of the Borexino and KamLAND experiments demonstrate the large potential of liquid-scintillator detectors in low-energy neutrino physics. Low energy threshold, good energy resolution and efficient background discrimination are inherent to the liquidscintillator technique. A target mass of 50 kt will offer a substantial increase in detection sensitivity.At low energies, the variety of detection channels available in liquid scintillator will allow for an energy-and flavor-resolved analysis of the neutrino burst emitted by a galactic Supernova. Due to target mass and background conditions, LENA will also be sensitive to the faint signal of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background. Solar metallicity, time-variation in the solar neutrino flux and deviations from MSW-LMA survival probabilities can be investigated based on unprecedented statistics. Low background conditions allow to search for dark matter by observing rare annihilation neutrinos. The large number of events expected for geoneutrinos will give valuable information on the abundances of Uranium and Thorium and their relative ratio in the Earth's crust and mantle. Reactor neutrinos enable a high-precision measurement of solar mixing parameters. A strong radioactive or pion decay-at-rest neutrino source can be placed close to the detector to investigate neutrino oscillations for short distances and sub-MeV to MeV energies.At high energies, LENA will provide a new lifetime limit for the SUSY-favored proton decay mode into kaon and antineutrino, surpassing current experimental limits by about one order of magnitude. Recent studies have demonstrated that a reconstruction of momentum and energy of GeV particles is well feasible in liquid scintillator. Monte Carlo studies on the reconstruction of the complex event topologies found for neutrino interactions at multi-GeV energies have shown promising results. If this is confirmed, LENA might serve as far detector in a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment currently investigated in LAGUNA-LBNO.3

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Low energy neutrino astronomy (LENA) has been proposed as a next generation 50 kt liquid scintillator detector. Its large target mass allows us to search for the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB), which was generated by the cumulative emissions of all core-collapse supemovae throughout the Universe. Indistinguishable background from reactor and atmospheric electron antineutrinos limits the detection window to the energy range between 9.5 MeV and 25 MeV. Depending on the mean supernova neutrino energy, about 5 to 10 events per year are expected in this energy window. The background from neutral current reactions of atmospheric neutrinos surpasses the DSNB by more than one order magnitude, but can be suppressed by pulse shape discrimination. Assuming that the residual background is known with 5% uncertainty, the DSNB can be detected with 3cr significance after 10 years of data taking. In case no hint for a signal is seen, the allowed parameter space of DSNB models would be substantially constrained and the currently favored predictions for spectral mean energy and supernova rate would be excluded with more than 90% C.L.

Scintillating CaWO 4 single crystals are a promising multi-element target for rare-event searches and are currently used in the direct dark matter experiment CRESST (Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers). The relative light output of different particle interactions in CaWO 4 is quantified by quenching factors (QFs). These are essential for an active background discrimination and the identification of a possible signal induced by weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). We present the first precise measurements of the QFs of O, Ca and W at mK temperatures by irradiating a cryogenic detector with a fast neutron beam. A clear energy dependence of the QF of O and, less pronounced, of Ca was observed for the first time. Furthermore, in CRESST neutron-calibration data a variation of the QFs among different CaWO 4 single crystals was found. For typical CRESST detectors the QFs in the region-of-interest (10-40 keV) are QF ROI O = (11.2 ± 0.5) %, QF ROI Ca = (5.94±0.49) % and QF ROI W = (1.72±0.21) %. The latest CRESST data (run32) is reanalyzed using these fundamentally new results on light quenching in CaWO 4 having moderate influence on the WIMP analysis. Their relevance for future CRESST runs and for the clarification of previa

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LENA (Low Energy Neutrino Astronomy) has been proposed as a next generation 50 kt liquid scintillator detector. The large target mass allows a high precision measurement of the solar 8 B neutrino spectrum, with an unprecedented energy threshold of 2 MeV. Hence, it can probe the MSW-LMA prediction for the electron neutrino survival probability in the transition region between vacuum and matter-dominated neutrino oscillations. Based on Monte Carlo simulations of the solar neutrino and the corresponding background spectra, it was found that the predicted upturn of the solar 8 B neutrino spectrum can be detected with 5σ significance after 5 years.

A: Unsegmented, large-volume liquid scintillator (LS) neutrino detectors have proven to be a key technology for low-energy neutrino physics. The efficient rejection of radionuclide background induced by cosmic muon interactions is of paramount importance for their success in high-precision MeV neutrino measurements. We present a novel technique to reconstruct GeV particle tracks in LS, whose main property, the resolution of topological features and changes in the differential energy loss dE/dx, allows for improved rejection strategies. Different to common track reconstruction approaches, our method does not rely on concrete track / topology hypotheses. Instead, based on a reference point in space and time, the observed distribution of photon arrival times at the photosensors and the detector's characteristics in terms of photon production, propagation and detection (optical model), it reconstructs the voxelized distribution of optical photon emissions. Techniques from three-dimensional data analysis can then be applied to extract parameters describing the topology, e.g., the direction of a track. We performed a first performance evaluation of our method using single muon events with up to 10 GeV from a Geant4 simulation of the LENA detector. The current results indicate that our approach is competitive with existing reconstruction methods -although its full potential has not yet been exploited. We also remark on other detector technologies in astroparticle physics as well as applications in medical imaging that could benefit from the fundamental ideas of our method. K: Data processing methods; Liquid detectors; Neutrino detectors; Large detector systems for particle and astroparticle physics A X P : 1803.08802

LENA (Low Energy Neutrino Astronomy) is a proposed next generation liquid-scintillator detector with about 50 kt target mass. Besides the detection of solar neutrinos, geoneutrinos, supernova neutrinos and the search for the proton decay, LENA could also be used as the far detector of a next generation neutrino beam. The present contribution outlines the status of the Monte Carlo studies towards the reconstruction of GeV neutrinos in LENA. Both the tracking capabilities at a few hundred MeV, most interesting for a beta beam, and above 1 GeV for a superbeam experiment are presented.