Expected performance of a water Cherenkov detector for reactor antineutrino--electron scattering

Abstract

We evaluate the expected performance of a 170-ton water Cherenkov detector for reactor antineutrino--electron elastic scattering at the RENO near-detector site. The reactor-spectrum normalization is extracted from the reconstructed recoil-electron directional distribution using a constrained profile-likelihood fit for an exposure of 365.25 days. For the minimum prompt-hit multiplicity $N_{\mathrm{prompt}}\geq8$ scenario, which neglects PMT radioactivity, the total uncertainty on the reactor-spectrum normalization is ${}^{+1.08\%}_{-1.07\%}$. For the more restrictive $N_{\mathrm{prompt}}\geq20$ scenario, which includes the simulated PMT-radioactivity components, the total uncertainty is ${}^{+1.49\%}_{-1.47\%}$. These results demonstrate that directional information from a water Cherenkov detector can provide percent-level sensitivity to the reactor elastic-scattering normalization.