An Overview of the KamLAND 1-kiloton Liquid Scintillator

Abstract

KamLAND is a massive liquid-scintillator-based neutrino detector studying low energy neutrino oscillation. The experiment has discovered a large deficit of the reactor neutrino flux with baseline of 180km in the year 2002. This result is placing a strong impact on the elementary particle physics. The KamLAND detector makes use of one kiloton of liquid scintillator (LS) as the active neutrino target. This is the largest homogeneous LS detector in the world. Although the light yield and attenuation length of the LS were measured to be 57% anthracene and ~10m, in the test experiments, when it is used in the KamLAND detector, the effective transparency and light yield significantly increased from these values, presumably due to the scattering and re-emission in the large scale LS. The radio active contamination in the LS is extremely low, such as 3.5E-18g/g for uranium. This is the world's lowest contamination record so far achieved and measured. The success of the KamLAND experiment is a fruit of this high-quality and large-quantity LS. In this proceedings, an outline of the LS is described.