Email: mjduvall at hawaii.edu
GitHub: duvall3.git at gmail.com
ORCiD: orcid.org/0009-0008-5163-2071
arXiv: arxiv.org/a/duvall_m_1
GitHub: github.com/duvall3
CV: DuvallMark_CV.pdf
New Approaches to Antineutrino Directionality
Submitted: 9th May 2022
Full Text on UH Mānoa ScholarSpace
Abstract:
The directional detection of electron antineutrinos undergoing inverse beta decay (IBD) has uses ranging from fundamental science (ex. sterile-neutrino searches, supernova physics) to industrial and even nonproliferation applications (ex. reactor analysis, fuel material, location). In this dissertation, we find that even under ideal conditions, the loss of directional information due to neutron scattering during thermalization and capture limits traditional reactor-IBD detectors to a mean angular agreement of <cos(ψ)> ~ 0.3, where ψ is the difference angle between the true and reconstructed incoming antineutrino directions. We examine a proposed method and corresponding detector design which our simulations indicate could reach <cos(ψ)> ~ 0.9, but is expected to struggle with background rejection and low data rates. By combining these approaches, we present a survey of novel reactor-IBD detectors designed to beat the limit imposed by neutron scattering while maintaining both a high signal rate and resilience against backgrounds. We discuss new related detection concepts and techniques as well.
Defense
Date: 8th April 2022
Video (MP4): Duvall_Defense_Video.mp4
Slides (PDF): Duvall_Defense_Slides.pdf
Supplementary Media:
"Lego-Ball" Plots (GIF): 3D_Results — spherical histograms of reconstructed direction to antineutrino source
UnrealEventViewer Demo: screenshot (PNG) | video (AVI) | YouTube — interactive viewer for both detector geometry and event playback
All Related Files:
Thesis_Public
Paper Derived from Dissertation (2024, journal publication pending):
Directional Response of Several Geometries for Reactor-Neutrino Detectors
Doctoral Dissertation (2022):
New Approaches to Antineutrino Directionality
Primary Paper on SANDD Detector (2021):
SANDD: A directional antineutrino detector with segmented 6Li-doped pulse-shape-sensitive plastic scintillator
Prototype Paper on SANDD Detector (2019):
A prototype for SANDD: A highly-segmented pulse-shape-sensitive plastic scintillator detector incorporating silicon photomultiplier arrays
Instrumentation Paper on mTC Phototube Cross-talk (2018):
Studies of MCP-PMTs in the miniTimeCube neutrino detector
Department of Energy SCGSR Scholarship (2016):
UH Physics Dept. Announcement
Primary Paper on miniTimeCube Detector [RSI Invited Article] (2016):
Invited Article: miniTimeCube (arXiv)
Invited Article: miniTimeCube (RSI)
Whitepaper on NuLat Detector (2015):
A new type of Neutrino Detector for Sterile Neutrino Search at Nuclear Reactors and Nuclear Nonproliferation Applications
My illustrious advisor, Dr. John G. Learned:
John Learned (JGL)
My wondeful colleague Slava Li:
Viacheslav Li (VLi)
The miniTimeCube collaboration:
miniTimeCube (mTC)
The NuLat collaboration:
Neutrino Lattice (NuLat)
My personal fork of the Monte Carlo package RAT-PAC (Reactor Analysis Tool, Plus Additional Code):
duvall3 --> RAT-PAC
Documentation for "Tools for Reactor-Antineutrino Studies in RAT-PAC" (part of the repository linked above), a suite of analysis and automation software that I've been developing since about 2013:
Tools for Reactor-Antineutrino Studies in RAT-PAC
RATPACEventViewer, an event viewer I created in ROOT for viewing RAT-PAC events:
RATPACEventViewer on GitHub
My personal collection of tips and tricks for BASH-type environments:
Useful Bash Stuff
Handy profile configs for new users / machines:
newhome
Introduction to the wonderful, underappreciated AWK text-processing language:
awk
Projects I've created with LilyPond, beautiful software for typesetting sheet music using LaTeX:
lilypond
Dockley Ranch Music Festival talk on the Voyager Golden Record:
The Music of Earth
My undergraduate thesis from the University of Tulsa:
Tenor Saxophone Multiphonics
FlashLogs:
README.html
README.txt
FlashLogs_Windows
Updated 2024/02/10