# Suppression of 14C photon hits in large liquid scintillator detectors via spatiotemporal deep learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27727 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27727/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05493/) (2015)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [Particle Transformer for Jet Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03772/) (2022)
- [Variational inference for pile-up removal at hadron colliders with diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22074/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Liquid scintillator detectors are widely used in neutrino experiments due to their low energy threshold and high energy resolution. Despite the tiny abundance of 14C in LS, the photons induced by the β decay of the 14C isotope inevitably contaminate the signal, degrading the energy resolution. In this work, we propose three models to tag 14C photon hits in e^+ events with 14C 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 14C and one e^+ with kinetic energy below 5 MeV, the models achieve 14C recall rates of 25%-48% while maintaining e^+ to 14C misidentification below 1%, leading to a large improvement in the resolution of total charge for events where e^+ and 14C photon hits strongly overlap in space and time.