Speaker
Description
We evaluate the expected performance of a water Cherenkov detector for reactor antineutrino--electron elastic scattering at the RENO near-detector site. The reactor-spectrum normalization is extracted from the reconstructed recoil-electron directional distribution using a constrained profile-likelihood analysis, while the effects of different event-selection thresholds and relevant background components, including PMT radioactivity and residual inverse-beta-decay events, are taken into account. Our results show that the characteristic directional correlation of elastic-scattering events provides effective discrimination between the reactor antineutrino signal and largely isotropic backgrounds. These results demonstrate that directional information in a water Cherenkov detector can enable percent-level sensitivity to the reactor antineutrino elastic-scattering normalization and highlight the potential of this approach for precision reactor-neutrino measurements.