Speaker
Description
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a next-generation particle physics experiment designed to study neutrino oscillation (in which neutrinos of one flavour transform into other flavours as they travel) alongside a broad program of other research. It will consist of two detector facilities, the Near Detector (ND) at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago, and the larger Far Detector (FD) which will be built 1300 km away in Lead, South Dakota.
The ND will characterize the initial energy spectrum and flavour makeup of the neutrino beam produced at Fermilab prior to its propagation through the ground to the FD, which will measure the extent to which the population of each flavour type within the beam has changed. In the first phase of DUNE's operations, both the ND and FD will use Liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers (LArTPCs) to detect and measure the energy of the neutrinos. Should a neutrino interact within the liquid argon, the resulting charged particles will produce both scintillation light and trails of ionization as they pass through the medium. Muon neutrinos will produce muons, which tend to leave long, signature tracks in the LArTPC. The momentum of a muon can be calculated from the length it travels before stopping, which allows the energy spectrum of the initial muon neutrino beam to be characterized. The LArTPC at the DUNE ND (ND-LAr) will detect the scintillation light and the freed electrons from the ionized argon and reconstruct three-dimensional particle traces from them. However, since muons are minimally-ionizing particles, at DUNE's energy range most muon tracks will be longer than ND-LAr itself. On its own, ND-LAr would only see a fraction of the track length of these uncontained muons, and would underestimate their momenta.
The Muon Spectrometer (TMS) is a scintillator detector located downstream of ND-LAr that will stop a significant number of the muons that escape ND-LAr while tracking their trajectories. The detector can also distinguish the charge sign of the muons. Muons that stop within TMS have a known total track length and momentum, provided that tracks belonging to the same muon in ND-LAr and TMS are correctly matched. This talk will outline methods being developed to match tracks between the components of the ND and illustrate how muon momentum can be reconstructed from these tracks.
| Keyword-1 | neutrino |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | DUNE |
| Keyword-3 | neutrino oscillation |