arXiv subjects

Yaoguang Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Yaoguang Wang.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Phast: Simultaneous reconstruction of photoelectron count and time profiles from PMT waveforms via machine learning

Photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) are widely used in particle and nuclear physics experiments. The reconstruction of PMT waveforms is a fundamental task in these experiments, where accurate extraction of photoelectron (PE) multiplicities and time from the waveform is required for downstream event reconstruction and analysis. In realistic detector environments, PMT waveform reconstruction is complicated by electronic effects such as pileup, charge fluctuations, noise etc., which make precise recovery of physical observables challenging. To address these challenges, we present \phast{}, a machine-learning-based method that reconstructs PE count and time profile simultaneously. The model consists of a shared wave-transformer encoder followed by two dedicated branches: a counting branch for the total PE number prediction, and a time branch employing a count-conditioned query decoder with dynamic query activation. To study the reconstruction performance under controlled conditions, we construct several toy Monte Carlo PMT waveform datasets, including both uniform and mixed fast-slow double-temporal-components configurations. The proposed method demonstrates stable and accurate reconstruction performance across various waveform conditions, achieving high consistency in both PE counting and time reconstruction. These results indicate that architectures combining convolutional feature extraction with query-based transformer decoders provide an effective approach for complex PMT waveform reconstruction tasks.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

Impact of the $^5$Li resonance in $α$-$p$ elastic scattering on precision measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters

Precision measurements of four neutrino oscillation parameters, $θ_{12}$, $θ_{13}$, $Δm^2_{21}$, and |$Δm^2_{31}$|, face significant interference from a previously overlooked correlated background. Recent findings from the SNO+ and JUNO experiments reveal that cascade decays of $^{214}$Bi-$^{214}$Po in liquid scintillator detectors can mimic inverse beta decay signals from reactor and geoneutrinos, with a misidentification probability on the order of $10^{-4}$ when hydrogen neutron capture is used, a rate ten times higher than Geant4 simulations predicted. This work identifies the $^5$Li resonance in $α$-$p$ elastic scattering as the underlying cause. For alpha energies above 5~MeV, the cross section is hundreds of times larger than that of Rutherford scattering. After correctly incorporating the differential cross section into Geant4, the misidentification probability is recalculated as 1.9$\times$10$^{-4}$. The simulated shape of the long tail in the alpha deposited energy also differs from the extrapolation models currently used by SNO+ and JUNO. These results will assist both experiments in more accurately estimating this novel background, thereby refining measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters and the geoneutrino flux. Additionally, the study implies an overlooked background with a rate of 0.5 events per detector per day in the Daya Bay $θ_{13}$ analysis using hydrogen neutron capture, leading to an increase of $\sin^22θ_{13}$ by approximately 0.012. Consequently, the Particle Data Group's reported $\sin^2θ_{13}$ value shall increase by about 0.006~(1$σ$).

nucl-ex↗

arXiv2026

Comprehensive study of cosmogenic neutron production in large liquid scintillator detectors

Neutrons produced by cosmic ray muons constitute a significant background for underground experiments investigating neutron oscillations, neutrinoless double beta decay, dark matter, and other rare event signals. This work benchmarks measured neutron yields and neutron multiplicities--with a focus on data from the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment--against comprehensive simulations using three GEANT4 hadronic physics lists. These simulations are further refined via a TALYS-based adjustment of hadronic cross sections. For the BERT-based models, the adjustment reduces the discrepancy in the total neutron yield from about 20% to approximately 6%, while for the BIC-based models it improves the agreement from roughly 13% to the sub-percent level (~0.3%), indicating a markedly better consistency of the BIC-based models with the experimental data. Nevertheless, a clear tension persists: simulations systematically underproduce single-neutron events while overproducing multi-neutron events. The study establishes a reproducible benchmark for cosmogenic neutron modeling and proposes a targeted refinement strategy--including channel-specific reweighting and intranuclear cascade parameter tuning--to guide future model development.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2025

Fluorescence time profile measurement of LAB based liquid scintillator in response to medium relativistic ion particles

Liquid scintillator is widely used in particle physics experiments due to its high light yield, good timing resolution, scalability and low cost. Certain liquid scintillators exhibit pulse shape discrimination capabilities because of difference in fluorescence timing properties induced by different particles. Its fluoresence timing properties have been measured mostly for radioactive decay sources at MeV energies. We present a novel measurement of fluorescence time properties of LAB based liquid scintillator in response to high-energy ions of hydrogen (Z = 1), helium (Z = 2) and Krypton at around 200-300 MeV/u for the first time. We compared the results to those from radioactive sources and observed a distinct $dE/dX$ dependence, regardless of the particle type. These findings are essential for physics searches such as the diffuse supernova neutrino background in large liquid scintillator detectors like JUNO, and are also critical towards understanding the underlying scintillation timing mechanism.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2023

Simulation Software of the JUNO Experiment

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a multi-purpose experiment, under construction in southeast China, that is designed to determine the neutrino mass ordering and precisely measure neutrino oscillation parameters. Monte Carlo simulation plays an important role for JUNO detector design, detector commissioning, offline data processing, and physics processing. The JUNO experiment has the world's largest liquid scintillator detector instrumented with many thousands of PMTs. The broad energy range of interest, long lifetime, and the large scale present data processing challenges across all areas. This paper describes the JUNO simulation software, highlighting the challenges of JUNO simulation and solutions to meet these challenges, including such issues as support for time-correlated analysis, event mixing, event correlation and handling the simulation of many millions of optical photons.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2022

Study of 20-inch PMTs dark count generated large pulses

The main goal of the JUNO experiment is to determine the neutrino mass ordering with a 20\,kt liquid-scintillator detector. The 20-inch PMT is crucial as one of JUNO key instruments to realize an excellent energy resolution of at least 3\,\% at 1\,MeV. The knowledge on PMT's characterisation and feature is critical for detector performance understanding. Large pulses from PMT dark count such as from flasher or others are one of the serious concerns for detector noise control. Focusing on the large pulses from 20-inch PMT dark count, this paper is trying to investigate the causes by measurements with a muon tagging system. It is found that the large pules of 20-inch PMT dark count is contributed mainly from muons hitting the PMT glass. A simulation is also realized and achieved a consistent understanding.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2022

A New Optical Model for Photomultiplier Tubes

It is critical to construct an accurate optical model of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) in many applications to describe the angular and spectral responses of the photon detection efficiency (PDE) of the PMTs in their working media. In this study, we propose a new PMT optical model to describe both light interactions with the PMT window and optical processes inside PMTs with reasonable accuracy based on the optics theory and a GEANT4-based simulation toolkit. The proposed model builds a relationship between the PDE and the underlying processes that the PDE relies on. This model also provides a tool to transform the PDE measured in one working medium (like air) to the PDE in other media (like water, liquid scintillator, etc). Using two 20" MCP-PMTs and one 20" dynode PMT, we demonstrate a complete procedure to obtain the key parameters used in the model from experimental data, such as the optical properties of the antireflective coating and photocathode of the three PMTs. The proposed model can effectively reproduce the angular responses of the quantum efficiency of PMTs, even though an ideally uniform photocathode is assumed in the model. Interestingly, the proposed model predicts a similar level ($20\%\sim30\%$) of light yield excess observed in the experimental data of many liquid scintillator-based neutrino detectors, compared with that predicted at the stage of detector design. However, this excess has never been explained, and the proposed PMT model provides a good explanation for it, which highlights the imperfections of PMT models used in their detector simulations.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2019

Escape, bound and capture geodesics in local static coordinates in Schwarzschild spacetime

The classical geodesics of timelike particles in Schwarzschild spacetime is analyzed according to the particle starting radius $r$, velocity $v$ and angle $α$ against the radial outward direction in the reference system of an local static observer. The region of escape, bound and capture orbits in the parameter space of $(r,~v,~α)$ are solved using the three cases of the effective potential. It is found that generally for radius smaller than $4M$ or velocity larger than $c/\sqrt{2}$ there will be no bound orbits. While for fixed radius larger than $4M$ (or velocity smaller than $c/\sqrt{2}$), as velocity (or radius) increase from zero (or $2M$), the particle is always captured until a critical value $v_{\mathrm{crit1}}$ (or $r_{\mathrm{crit1}}$) when the bound orbit start to appear around $α=π/2$ between a double-napped cone structure. As the velocity (or radius) increases to another critical value $v_{\mathrm{crit2}}$ (or $r_{\mathrm{crit2}}$) then the bound directions and escape directions in the outward cone become escape directions, leaving only the inward cone separating the capture and bound directions. The angle of this cone will increase to its asymptotic value as velocity (or radius) increases to its asymptotic value. The implication of these results in shadow of black holes formed by massive particles, in black hole accretion and in spacecraft navigation is briefly discussed.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2019

On the Possibility to Determine Neutrino Mass Hierarchy via Supernova Neutrinos with Short-Time Characteristics

In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy via a high-statistics and real-time observation of supernova neutrinos with short-time characteristics. The essential idea is to utilize distinct times-of-flight for different neutrino mass eigenstates from a core-collapse supernova to the Earth, which may significantly change the time distribution of neutrino events in the future huge water-Cherenkov and liquid-scintillator detectors. For illustration, we consider two different scenarios. The first case is the neutronization burst of $ν^{}_e$ emitted in the first tens of milliseconds of a core-collapse supernova, while the second case is the black hole formation during the accretion phase for which neutrino signals are expected to be abruptly terminated. In the latter scenario, it turns out only when the supernova is at a distance of a few Mpc and the fiducial mass of the detector is at the level of gigaton, might we be able to discriminate between normal and inverted neutrino mass hierarchies. In the former scenario, the probability for such a discrimination is even less due to a poor statistics.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2017

Existence and stability of circular orbits in general static and spherically symmetric spacetimes

The existence and stability of circular orbits (CO) in static and spherically symmetric (SSS) spacetime are important because of their practical and potential usefulness. In this paper, using the fixed point method, we first prove a necessary and sufficient condition on the metric function for the existence of timelike COs in SSS spacetimes. After analyzing the asymptotic behavior of the metric, we then show that asymptotic flat SSS spacetime that corresponds to a negative Newtonian potential at large $r$ will always allow the existence of CO. The stability of the CO in a general SSS spacetime is then studied using the Lyapunov exponent method. Two sufficient conditions on the (in)stability of the COs are obtained. For null geodesics, a sufficient condition on the metric function for the (in)stability of null CO is also obtained. We then illustrate one powerful application of these results by showing that an SU(2) Yang-Mills-Einstein SSS spacetime whose metric function is not known, will allow the existence of timelike COs. We also used our results to assert the existence and (in)stabilities of a number of known SSS metrics.

gr-qc↗