High-accuracy ultrasonic positioning of calibration sources in the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory

Abstract

Precise source positioning is essential for detector calibration in large liquid scintillator detectors such as JUNO, particularly in regions where purely mechanical control is insufficient. An ultrasonic positioning system has been developed to reconstruct the three-dimensional coordinates of a calibration source without interfering with photon collection or contaminating the liquid scintillator. The method combines a sound-speed modeling based on dedicated laboratory measurements and in-detector temperature profiles, waveform-based arrival-time reconstruction, and an in-situ calibration of the effective receiver geometry using central-axis deployments. With six active receivers, central-axis positioning yields a mean error of 1.23 cm relative to the known deployment reference. For off-axis operation in the Cable Loop System calibration plane, a detector-realistic simulation that includes timing resolution, sound-speed variation, and receiver-coordinate smearing predicts a positioning uncertainty of 2.40 cm. These results demonstrate that ultrasonic positioning can provide centimetre-level source accuracy for large liquid scintillator detectors and can support off-axis calibration in JUNO-like experiments.