Natural Chlorine Enhances Antineutrino Detection in the Deep Ocean
Abstract
Large-volume neutrino telescopes such as IceCube and KM3NeT exploit natural ice or water as detection media, but their sparse instrumentation makes MeV neutrino interactions difficult to identify individually. We show that chlorine naturally abundant in seawater provides an intrinsic neutron-capture target that enables efficient tagging of electron antineutrinos through inverse beta decay. In contrast to the 2.2 MeV γ-ray from neutron capture on hydrogen, capture on chlorine produces an ∼8.6 MeV γ-ray cascade on a shorter time scale, yielding a distinctive delayed-coincidence signature. Using measured seawater properties at the TRIDENT site and a detector-level simulation, we find that chlorine-assisted tagging can extend the core-collapse supernova 5σ discovery reach from ∼50 to over 100 kpc. We validate the underlying detection principle with a salted-water experiment at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory, observing correlated neutron-capture signatures under suppressed cosmic muon background conditions. Natural seawater thus transforms the deep ocean into an intrinsically enhanced antineutrino detection medium, opening new opportunities for MeV neutrino astronomy and distributed measurements of reactor and geophysical antineutrinos.
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BibTeX
@misc{cao2026natural,
title = {{Natural Chlorine Enhances Antineutrino Detection in the Deep Ocean}},
author = {Ruike Cao and Iwan Morton-Blake and Donglian Xu and Qichao Chang and Shuhua Hao and Jingtao Huang and Weilun Huang and Yifan Jiang and Shasha Liu and Hualin Mei and Hengbin Shao and Yingwei Wang and Peilian Wu and Xin Xiang and Fuyudi Zhang and Haoyan Zhang and Zhaozhi Zhang and Tailin Zhu and Yiwei Zhu},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.30754},
eprint = {2610.30754},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30754},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Natural Chlorine Enhances Antineutrino Detection in the Deep Ocean
AU - Ruike Cao
AU - Iwan Morton-Blake
AU - Donglian Xu
AU - Qichao Chang
AU - Shuhua Hao
AU - Jingtao Huang
AU - Weilun Huang
AU - Yifan Jiang
AU - Shasha Liu
AU - Hualin Mei
AU - Hengbin Shao
AU - Yingwei Wang
AU - Peilian Wu
AU - Xin Xiang
AU - Fuyudi Zhang
AU - Haoyan Zhang
AU - Zhaozhi Zhang
AU - Tailin Zhu
AU - Yiwei Zhu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/22
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.30754
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30754
AB - Large-volume neutrino telescopes such as IceCube and KM3NeT exploit natural ice or water as detection media, but their sparse instrumentation makes MeV neutrino interactions difficult to identify individually. We show that chlorine naturally abundant in seawater provides an intrinsic neutron-capture target that enables efficient tagging of electron antineutrinos through inverse beta decay. In contrast to the 2.2 MeV γ-ray from neutron capture on hydrogen, capture on chlorine produces an ∼8.6 MeV γ-ray cascade on a shorter time scale, yielding a distinctive delayed-coincidence signature. Using measured seawater properties at the TRIDENT site and a detector-level simulation, we find that chlorine-assisted tagging can extend the core-collapse supernova 5σ discovery reach from ∼50 to over 100 kpc. We validate the underlying detection principle with a salted-water experiment at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory, observing correlated neutron-capture signatures under suppressed cosmic muon background conditions. Natural seawater thus transforms the deep ocean into an intrinsically enhanced antineutrino detection medium, opening new opportunities for MeV neutrino astronomy and distributed measurements of reactor and geophysical antineutrinos.
ER -