Muon-induced ¹²B and ¹²N on Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment

Abstract

The Daya Bay neutrino experiment is designed for measuring the non-zero value for the neutrino mixing angle θ_13. For rare-event detection experiment such as neutrino detection, double-beta-decay experiments and dark-matter searches, cosmic ray muon produced radioactive isotopes are important background. Understanding more about the cosmic ray muon induced radioactive isotopes will help a lot with more precise measurements. My work here is to measure the absolute production yields of radioactive isotopes using different time windows and energy cuts and the associated work here is to extract different isotopes from the candidate events. Three different fitting methods are provided here for data analysis with Monte Carlo tests. Cross check of the result has been done with other group's work using different data selection criteria as well as fitting method. The power law for energy dependence of total cross-section for all muon-produced radioactive isotopes in scintillator target was tested using data from KamLAND [1] and Borexino [7] and using the result of a similar experiment at the SPS muon beam at CERN [23].