[2603.27727] Suppression of $^{14}\mathrm{C}$ photon hits in large liquid scintillator detectors via spatiotemporal deep learning

Physics > Instrumentation and Detectors arXiv:2603.27727 (physics) [Submitted on 29 Mar 2026] Title:Suppression of $^{14}\mathrm{C}$ photon hits in large liquid scintillator detectors via spatiotemporal deep learning Authors:Junle Li, Zhaoxiang Wu, Guanda Gong, Zhaohan Li, Wuming Luo, Jiahui Wei, Wenxing Fang, Hehe Fan View a PDF of the paper titled Suppression of $^{14}\mathrm{C}$ photon hits in large liquid scintillator detectors via spatiotemporal deep learning, by Junle Li and 7 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Liquid scintillator detectors are widely used in neutrino experiments due to their low energy threshold and high energy resolution. Despite the tiny abundance of $^{14}$C in LS, the photons induced by the $\beta$ decay of the $^{14}$C isotope inevitably contaminate the signal, degrading the energy resolution. In this work, we propose three models to tag $^{14}$C photon hits in $e^+$ events with $^{14}$C pile-up, thereby suppressing its impact on the energy resolution at the hit level: a gated spatiotemporal graph neural network and two Transformer-based models with scalar and vector charge encoding. For a simulation dataset in which each event contains one $^{14}$C and one $e^+$ with kinetic energy below 5 MeV, the models achieve $^{14}$C recall rates of 25%-48% while maintaining $e^+$ to $^{14}$C misidentification below 1%, leading to a large improvement in the resolution of total charge for events where $e^+$ and $^{14}$C photon hits strongl...