Multi-site event discrimination in large liquid scintillation detectors

Simulation studies have been carried out to explore the ability to discriminate between single-site and multi-site energy depositions in large scale liquid scintillation detectors. A robust approach has been found that is predicted to lead to a significant statistical separation for a large variety of event classes, providing a powerful tool to discriminate against backgrounds and break important degeneracies in signal extraction. This has particularly relevant implications for liquid scintillator searches for neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) from 130Te and 136Xe, where it is possible for a true 0νββ signal to be distinguished from most radioactive backgrounds (including those from cosmogenic production) as well as unknown gamma lines from the target isotope.