Neutral-current background induced by atmospheric neutrinos at large liquid-scintillator detectors: I. model predictions

Understand

The experimental searches for diffuse supernova neutrino background and proton decay in next-generation large liquid-scintillator (LS) detectors are competitive with and complementary to those in the water-Cherenkov detectors.

• In this paper, we carry out a systematic study of the dominant background induced by atmospheric neutrinos via their neutral-current (NC) interactions with the $^{12}{\rm C}$ nuclei in the LS detectors.
• The atmospheric neutrino fluxes at the location of Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) are used, as the JUNO detector is obviously a suitable representative for future LS detectors.
• Then, we implement the sophisticated generators \texttt{GENIE} and \texttt{NuWro} to simulate the neutrino interactions with the carbon nuclei, and the package \texttt{TALYS} to deal with the deexcitations of final-state nuclei.