Measurement of muon-induced neutron yield at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory
Zhao, Lin; Luo, Wentai; Bathe-Peters, Lars; Chen, Shaomin; Chouaki, Mourad; Dou, Wei; Guo, Lei; Guo, Ziyi; Hussain, Ghulam; Li, Jinjing; Liang, Ye; Liu, Qian; Luo, Guang; Qi, Ming; Shao, Wenhui; Tang, Jian; Wan, Linyan; Wang, Zhe; Wu, Yiyang; Xu, Benda; Xu, Tong; Xu, Weiran; Yang, Yuzi; Yeh, Minfang; Zhang, Aiqiang; Zhang, Bin
Solar, terrestrial, and supernova neutrino experiments are subject to muon-induced radioactive background. The China Jinping Underground Laboratory (CJPL), with its unique advantage of a 2400 m rock coverage and long distance from nuclear power plants, is ideal for MeV-scale neutrino experiments. Using a 1-ton prototype detector of the Jinping Neutrino Experiment (JNE), we detected 343 high-energy cosmic-ray muons and (7.86 3.97) muon-induced neutrons from an 820.28-day dataset at the first phase of CJPL (CJPL-I). Based on the muon-induced neutrons, we measured the corresponding muon-induced neutron yield in a liquid scintillator to be μ−1g−1cm2 at an average muon energy of 340 GeV. We provided the first study for such neutron background at CJPL. A global fit including this measurement shows a power-law coefficient of (0.75 0.02) for the dependence of the neutron yield at the liquid scintillator on muon energy.
