Measurement of the refractive index of the LAB-based liquid scintillator and acrylic at RENO

In this paper, we describe the first measurement of the refractive index of the linear alkyl benzene (LAB)-based liquid scintillator and acrylic used at the Reactor Experiment for Neutrino Oscillation (RENO). The refractive index of a material is an important optical property and the prism spectrometer is the most common device for measuring the refractive index. Using the minimum deviation technique, which requires an exact measurement of the apex angle, we determined the refractive indices at six different wavelengths and then fitted them. We also compared the refractive index of the LAB-based liquid scintillator with the refractive indices of other liquid scintillator solvents commonly used in reactor neutrino experiments.