Spectrum of Supernova Neutrinos in Ultra-pure Scintillators

Understand

There is a great interest in measuring the non-electronic component of neutrinos from core collapse supernovae by observing, for the first time, also neutral-current reactions.

• In order to assess the physics potential of the ultra-pure scintillators in this respect, we study the entire expected energy spectrum in the Borexino, KamLAND and SNO+ detectors.
• We examine the various sources of uncertainties in the expectations, and in particular, those due to specific detector features and to the relevant cross sections.
• We discuss the possibility to identify the different neutrino flavors, and we quantify the effect of confusion, due to other components of the energy spectrum, overlapped with the neutral-current reactions of interest.