Exploring Spectral Photon Sorting in Large Neutrino Detectors

Identifying Cherenkov photons produced when charged particles interact with scintillators provides additional information about the interaction, including directionality and particle identification, while maintaining the excellent energy and position resolution typical of scintillator detectors. Dichroicons achieve this by spectrally sorting photons with a Winston cone made from dichroic filters, which reflects photons inconsistent with typical scintillation spectra to one PMT, and passes other photons to another PMT. A simulation model of dichroicon prototypes has been implemented in the GPU-enabled photon Monte Carlo package Chroma. This model is used to evaluate the background rejection, particle identification, and direction reconstruction performance of a large liquid scintillator detector instrumented with dichroicons.