https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-025-14161-6
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
First-principle event reconstruction by time-charge readouts for TAO
1
Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
2
Center for High Energy Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
3
Key Laboratory of Particle and Radiation Imaging (Tsinghua University), Ministry of Education, Beijing, China
4
Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, UTIAS, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
5
Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Received:
13
January
2025
Accepted:
7
April
2025
Published online:
19
April
2025
The Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO) is a liquid-scintillator satellite experiment of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) to measure the reference reactor neutrino spectrum with unprecedented energy resolution. We use inhomogeneous Poisson process and Tweedie generalized linear model (GLM) to characterize the detector response and the charge distribution of a SiPM. We develop a pure probabilistic model for time and charge of SiPMs from first principles to reconstruct point-like events in the TAO central detector. Thanks to our precise model and the high photo-coverage and quantum efficiency of the SiPM tiles at TAO, we achieve vertex position resolution better than 
, energy resolution of about 
at 
and 
non-uniformity, marking the world’s best performance of liquid scintillator detectors. With such resolution, we perceive 
events to exhibit track effects. It opens up an exciting possibility of computed tracking calorimeter for unsegmented liquid scintillator detector like TAO. Our methodology is applicable to other experiments that utilize PMTs for time and charge readouts.
The original online version of this article has been revised. In the article, Equation 30 was listed incorrectly: a backslash was missing before "quad".
An erratum to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-025-14283-x.
© The Author(s) 2025
corrected publication 2025
corrected publication 2025
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Funded by SCOAP3.
