arXiv subjects

Iván Sidelnik

Publications and source records attributed to Iván Sidelnik.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Water Cherenkov Detectors in Precision Agriculture: A Novel Approach for High-Resolution Soil Moisture Monitoring

Water Cherenkov Detectors (WCDs), traditionally employed in cosmic-ray detection, are repurposed here for precision soil moisture monitoring using cosmic-ray neutron sensing. This approach offers advantages over conventional neutron probes, including enhanced sensitivity to low moisture levels and the ability to cover larger soil volumes without subsurface intrusion. This study evaluates the feasibility of WCDs for agricultural neutron hydrometry, addressing challenges such as background suppression and data interpretation in heterogeneous soils. We present experimental results from controlled wet and dry soil-condition emulations, alongside Monte Carlo simulations using Geant4 with an atmospheric neutron spectrum to correlate signal variation with soil-moisture differences. By bridging particle physics and agronomy, WCDs could advance soil moisture monitoring, offering a non-invasive, scalable, and accurate alternative for optimizing agricultural water use. Preliminary findings suggest a transformative potential for sustainable farming, though further research is needed to enhance cost-efficiency and adaptability to diverse soil types.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

Two-Stage Gamma-Neutron Source Classification in Water Cherenkov Detectors: Energy Threshold Screening and Machine Learning Pulse Analysis

Water Cherenkov detectors offer a robust and economical solution for real-time radiation monitoring by detecting Cherenkov light from charged particles moving faster than light in water. This work presents a novel two-stage classification framework for gamma-neutron discrimination: an initial physics-based energy threshold filters unambiguous low-energy gamma sources, followed by a machine learning ensemble that resolves ambiguities at higher energies. The detector response was characterized using $^{60}$Co (1.17/1.33~MeV), $^{137}$Cs (0.66~MeV), and a shielded $^{241}$AmBe source, with lead, paraffin, and cadmium shielding employed to isolate neutron and gamma interactions. Energy calibration established a linear ADU to MeV conversion ($R^2 = 0.966$), enabling identification of a neutron detection threshold at $2.62 \pm 0.77$~MeV via a $3σ$ significance analysis. Stage one categorizes sources as pure gamma (below threshold) or neutron-emitting (at threshold). For ambiguous cases above threshold, a machine learning pipeline utilizing pulse shape analysis was developed. A soft voting ensemble (Bagging, CatBoost, and MLP) achieved an accuracy of 0.816 and an AUC of 0.921. This hybrid scheme combines physics-based filtering with ML refinement, offering an interpretable and scalable solution for nuclear security, nonproliferation monitoring, and fundamental radiation research.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2022

The ARTI Framework: Cosmic Rays Atmospheric Background Simulations

ARTI is a complete framework designed to simulate the signals produced by the secondary particles emerging from the interaction of single, multiple and even, the complete flux of primary cosmic rays with the atmosphere. These signals are simulated for any particle detector located at any place (latitude, longitude and altitude), including the real-time atmospheric, geomagnetic and detector conditions. Formulated through a sequence of codes written in C++, Fortran, Bash and Perl, it provides an easy-to-use integration of three different simulation environments: magnetocosmic, CORSIKA and Geant4. These tools evaluate the geomagnetic field effects on the primary flux, the atmospheric showers of cosmic rays and the detectors' response to the secondary flux of particles. In this work, we exhibit the usage of the ARTI framework by calculating the total expected flux of signals at eight selected sites of the Latin American Giant Observatory, a cosmic ray Observatory located in Latin America covering a wide range altitudes, latitudes and geomagnetic rigidities. ARTI also calculates the flux of signals expected during the sudden occurrence of a gamma-ray burst or the flux of energetic photons originating in steady gamma sources. It also compares these fluxes with the expected background to detect these phenomena in a single water Cherenkov detector deployed in high altitude sites. Even more, by using ARTI, it is possible to calculate in a very precise way the expected flux of high energetic muons and other secondaries on the ground and to inject it over a geological structure for muography applications.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2022

A Novel Cloud-Based Framework for Standardised Simulations in the Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO)

LAGO, the Latin American Giant Observatory, is an extended cosmic ray observatory, consisting of a wide network of water Cherenkov detectors located in 10 countries. With different altitudes and geomagnetic rigidity cutoffs, their geographic distribution, combined with the new electronics for control, atmospheric sensing and data acquisition, allows the realisation of diverse astrophysics studies at a regional scale. It is an observatory designed, built and operated by the LAGO Collaboration, a non-centralised alliance of 30 institutions from 11 countries. While LAGO has access to different computational frameworks, it lacks standardised computational mechanisms to fully grasp its cooperative approach. The European Commission is fostering initiatives aligned to LAGO objectives, especially to enable Open Science and its long-term sustainability. This work introduces the adaptation of LAGO to this paradigm within the EOSC-Synergy project, focusing on the simulations of the expected astrophysical signatures at detectors deployed at the LAGO sites around the World.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2021

The EOSC-Synergy cloud services implementation for the Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO)

The Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO) is a distributed cosmic ray observatory at a regional scale in Latin America, by deploying a large network of Water Cherenkov detectors (WCD) and other astroparticle detectors in a wide range of latitudes from Antarctica to México, and altitudes from sea level to more than 5500 m a.s.l. Detectors telemetry, atmospherics conditions and flux of secondary particles at the ground are measured with extreme detail at each LAGO site by using our own-designed hardware and firmware (ACQUA). To combine and analyse all these data, LAGO developed ANNA, our data analysis framework. Additionally, ARTI, a complete framework of simulations designed to simulate the expected signals at our detectors coming from primary cosmic rays entering the Earth atmosphere, allowing a precise characterization of the sites in realistic atmospheric, geomagnetic and detector conditions. As the measured and synthetic data started to flow, we are facing challenging scenarios given a large amount of data emerging, performed on a diversity of detectors and computing architectures and e-infrastructures. These data need to be transferred, analyzed, catalogued, preserved, and provided for internal and public access and data-mining under an open e-science environment. In this work, we present the implementation of ARTI at the EOSC-Synergy cloud-based services as the first example of LAGO' frameworks that will follow the FAIR principles for provenance, data curation and re-using of data. For this, we calculate the flux of secondary particles expected in up to 1 week at detector level for all the 26 LAGO, and the 1-year flux of high energy secondaries expected at the ANDES Underground Laboratory and other sites. Therefore, we show how this development can help not only LAGO but other data-intensive cosmic rays observatories, muography experiments and underground laboratories.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2021

The Skipper CCD for low-energy threshold particle experiments above ground

We present experimental results using a single-electron resolution Skipper-CCD running above ground level to demonstrate the potential of this technology for its use in reactor neutrino observations and other low-energy particle interaction experiments. Operating conditions and event-selection criteria are provided to decouple most of the background rate at low energies. Our final results for events with energies as low as $5$ ionized electron-hole pairs show that the exponentially increasing rate of events seen in other technologies is not present in our data. This demonstrates that the Skipper CCD proves to be among the best options to measure low energy and weakly interacting particles at ground level.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2017

LAGO: the Latin American Giant Observatory

The Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO) is an extended cosmic ray observatory composed of a network of water-Cherenkov detectors (WCD) spanning over different sites located at significantly different altitudes (from sea level up to more than $5000$\,m a.s.l.) and latitudes across Latin America, covering a wide range of geomagnetic rigidity cut-offs and atmospheric absorption/reaction levels. The LAGO WCD is simple and robust, and incorporates several integrated devices to allow time synchronization, autonomous operation, on board data analysis, as well as remote control and automated data transfer. This detection network is designed to make detailed measurements of the temporal evolution of the radiation flux coming from outer space at ground level. LAGO is mainly oriented to perform basic research in three areas: high energy phenomena, space weather and atmospheric radiation at ground level. It is an observatory designed, built and operated by the LAGO Collaboration, a non-centralized collaborative union of more than 30 institutions from ten countries. In this paper we describe the scientific and academic goals of the LAGO project - illustrating its present status with some recent results - and outline its future perspectives.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2016

Luminescent and Scintillating Properties of Lanthanum Fluoride Nanocrystals in Response to Gamma/Neutron Irradiation: Codoping with Ce Activator, Yb Wavelength Shifter, and Gd Neutron Captor

A novel concept for detection and spectroscopy of gamma rays, and detection of thermal neutrons based on codoped lanthanum fluoride nanocrystals containing gadolinium is presented.The trends of colloidal synthesis of the mentioned material, LaF3 co-doped with Ce as the activator, Yb as the wavelength-shifter and Gd as the neutron captor, is reported. Nanocrystals of the mentioned material were characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), optical absorption, and photoluminescence spectroscopy. Gamma detection and its potential spectroscopy feature have been confirmed. The neutron detection capability has been confirmed by experiments performed using a 252Cf neutron source.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2014

Astroparticles in Latin America: current status and outlook

The successful installation and operation of the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina has been a milestone in Astroparticle research in Latin America, generating new regional research opportunities in the field. In this context, the LAGO project, begun in 2005 with the aim of studying the high-energy component of gamma ray bursts (GRBs). This observatory consists of different arrays of water-Cherenkov detectors installed in high altitude mountains throughout Latin America. Recently, it has demonstrated the feasibility of conducting studies on the solar modulation of the galactic cosmic ray flux. Currently more than 80 scientists and students from Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina are integrated into the LAGO Collaboration. The high level of regional integration in the scientific community reached thanks to this kind of major projects, has led to the recent formation of the CLES (Consorcio Latinoamericano de Experimentos Subterráneos). This organization promotes the creation and installation of the ANDES Underground Laboratory to be built inside the projected International Agua Negra tunnel between Argentina and Chile. The ANDES laboratory with over 1750 meters of rock cover, will be the first laboratory of its kind to be installed in the Southern Hemisphere.

astro-ph.IM↗