A Compton Spectrometer Experiment in Support of the NOνA Experiment Calibration Effort

AbstractThe NOνA experiment is part of the next generation of accelerator neutrino experiments. Liquid scintillators like those used in NOνA suffer from several effects which result in nonlinear response. NOνA uses in-situ muons to calibrate the detector, but the response can be suppressed by up to 15% for electrons, positrons, and gammas by these effects. There is an ongoing effort at the University of Tennessee to measure the non-linear response of the NOνA liquid scintillator. We measure both Birks coefficient and the UV re-emission properties of the scintillator (The UV re-emission measurements were a separate experiment performed by UT graduate student Philip Mason). These results will then be used in simulations to predict the response of the liquid scintillator to electromagnetic particles at incident energies up to several GeV