Detecting thermal neutrinos from supernovae with DUMAND

The Deep Underwater Muon and Neutrino Detector (DUMAND) could be made sensitive to the thermal (about 10-MeV) neutrinos from a supernova, as well as the TeV neutrinos for which it was originally designed, by clustering the photomultiplier tubes used to detect the Cerenkov light produced by neutrino interactions into nodes of four tubes. Requiring coincident counts from three or four of the tubes at a node would reduce the background from bioluminescence enough to allow the detection of the neutrinos from a supernova. A modified DUMAND using quadruple coincidence would have detected roughly eight neutrinos from SN 1987A and would detect about 280 neutrinos from a Galactic supernova at a distance of 9 kpc. Triple coincidence could be used with a Galactic supernova and would detect about 1500 neutrinos. 26 references