Speaker
Description
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is an upcoming long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment that will feature a near detector complex and new neutrino beam at Fermilab and a far detector complex 1300 km away at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. While the designs of the first and second DUNE far detector modules have been finalized as liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs) with wire and strip-based readout, the designs of the third and fourth DUNE far detector modules are currently still under consideration. One possibility is to still operate them each as 17 kiloton LArTPCs, but to upgrade them with pixelated charge readout, enhancing their detection capabilities. LArPix is a self-triggered charge amplification and digitization ASIC, which serves as the enabling technology for DUNE's liquid argon near detector and its ~14 million charge-sensitive pixels. LArPix can provide the scalability needed to handle readout of the O(100 million) pixels that a pixelated DUNE far detector would contain, but operation in detectors of this scale requires new mechanical designs and new multiplexing capabilities. This talk will present the status of a LArPix-based far detector module prototype that is currently being built and tested at the CERN Neutrino Platform, the status of the MADCAP multiplexing ASIC being developed to enable LArPix's scaling to a multi-kiloton module, and the path towards a pixelated far detector for DUNE.