Proton energy quenching and pulse shape discrimination in organic liquid scintillator for LENA

LENA is a proposed 50 kt neutrino observatory based on liquid scintillator. Due to its low energy threshold, liquid scintillator allows measurements in the MeV range and below. The Maier-Leibnitz-Laboratorium in Garching provides excellent conditions for studying energy dependent quenching of protons and particle discrimination via pulse-shape analysis in liquid scintillator. The tandem-accelerator provides a source of mono-energetic neutrons to which a scintillator sample is exposed. To provide a good energy scale careful calibration with gamma-sources of the setup is required. For this, Monte-Carlo simulations have been performed to understand the physical processes inside the detector. The simulated data has then been compared to the real measurements and a good agreement has been found. Further understanding of the calibration is achieved by using a secondary HPGe-detector which measured the gammas backscattered within the scintillator. This work has been supported by the Maier-Leibnitz-Laboratorium and the cluster of excellence 'Origin and Structure of the Universe'.