The determination capability of potential neutrinos from gravitational wave sources and contributions of extra detector at the future reactor neutrino experiment

Abstract

After several gravitational wave transients were discovered since 2015, studying neutrino signals coincident with the gravitational wave events now becomes an important mission for the existing neutrino experiments. Unfortunately, no candidate neutrinos have been found yet. This article introduces a method to find the neutrino excess to search for the potential neutrinos from gravitational wave sources at the future reactor neutrino experiment (such as JUNO and RENO-50). According to our calculations and simulations, the non-detection of $\bar\nu_e$ associated with gravitational waves at the nominal JUNO experiment gives rise to the $\bar\nu_e$ signal sensitivity at 90$\%$ confidence level (C.L.), $\mu_{90}$ = 2.44. This corresponds to the range of neutrino fluence on the Earth around 6 $\times$ 10$^{10}$ cm$^{-2}$ to 4 $\times$ 10$^{10}$ cm$^{-2}$ with neutrino energy range from 1.8 MeV to 120 MeV at monochromatic energy spectrum assumption. Based on certain popular models which describe the gravitational wave sources, we calculate the corresponding fluence ($F_{UL}^{90}$), which is around 1 - 3 $\times$ 10$^{8}$ cm$^{-2}$ for both monochromatic energy spectrum assumption and Fermi-Dirac energy spectrum assumption. Then we convert $F_{UL}^{90}$ into the detectable distance ($D_\text{UL}^{90}$), about 1 - 3 Mpc for two assumptions, with the predicted luminosities in these known models. To further improve the sensitivity, we discuss the potential benefits from an extra detector, with different target masses and baselines. Particularly, there will be around 38\% sensitivity improvement and around 28$\%$ detectable distance increasing if the extra detector is designed to be identical to the JUNO detector. On the other hand, instead of building an extra detector, if we combine the JUNO experiment with the RENO-50 experiment, the sensitivity will also be significantly improved.