Impact of external radiation on dark rate noise measurement for the Hyper-Kamiokande photomultiplier tube

Abstract The Hyper-Kamiokande (HK) is a next-generation water Cherenkov detector currently under construction in Japan as of 2025, and scheduled to begin operation in 2027. A new PMT has been developed for HK with improvements in detection efficiency, timing resolution, and pressure tolerance by a factor of two with respect to those used in the Super-Kamiokande detector. The HK detector will be instrumented with 20,000 photomultiplier tubes (PMT). Currently, the PMTs are produced, and the performance testing of the delivered PMTs is underway in parallel. In this test, it was observed that the dark rate values differed depending on the measurement location. The difference is considered due to environmental radiation, and we have conducted measurements of dark rate variations with radiation sources. We measured correlations between the irradiation of γ rays and dark noise rate and the evaluated intrinsic dark noise rate of HK PMT after subtracting the contribution due to environmental radiation.