Spectrum of Supernova Neutrinos in Ultra-pure Scintillators

Abstract

There is a great interest in measuring the non-electronic component of neutrinos from core collapse supernovae by observing, for the first time, also neutral-current reactions. In order to assess the physics potential of the ultra-pure scintillators in this respect, we study the entire expected energy spectrum in the Borexino, KamLAND and SNO+ detectors. We examine the various sources of uncertainties in the expectations, and in particular, those due to specific detector features and to the relevant cross sections. We discuss the possibility to identify the different neutrino flavors, and we quantify the effect of confusion, due to other components of the energy spectrum, overlapped with the neutral-current reactions of interest.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure