Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber Neutrino Experiments

by Jonathan Asaadi (UT Arlington)

Tuesday 7 May 2019, 12:30 → 13:30 America/Los_Angeles

48/2-224 - Madrone (SLAC)

The experimental observation that neutrinos will undergo flavor change, known as neutrino oscillations, stands as one of the most important discoveries in particle physics in the last twenty years. This fact is made even more evident by the recent award of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 for ``pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos'' and again in 2015 for ``for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass''. The emerging picture to explain the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation is one in which the three flavours of neutrinos ($\nu_{e}, \nu_{\mu}, \nu_{\tau}$) mix with the three neutrino mass eigenstates ($\nu_{1}, \nu_{2}, \nu_{3}$) with relatively small mass differences ($\Delta m_{31}^{2}\sim 0.0024 eV^{2}$ and $\Delta m_{21}^{2}~\sim~0.000075 eV^{2}$). The exact ordering of the neutrino mass states, known as the mass hierarchy, as well as the size of the CP-violating phase $\delta$ are represent the next major milestone for future neutrino experiments. This talk will cover the current experimental program and recent R&D utilizing liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) neutrino detectors which aim to answer these fundamental questions in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).