SuperFGD, a new detector concept for T2K-II

by César Jesús-Valls (IFAE)

Wednesday 4 Nov 2020, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Madrid

IFAE Virtual Seminar Room (IFAE)

Context
Tokai-to-Kamikande (T2K) is a well established long-baseline neutrino experiment located in Japan. It consists of a near detector, ND280, and a far detector at a distance of 295 km. The far detector is Super Kamiokande (SK), a 22.5 kton water Cerenkov detector.  The near detector ND280,  is a magnetized detector consisting of various sub-detectors allowing to study neutral and charged current neutrino interactions . It serves to characterize the neutrino flux and to measure the neutrino interaction cross-sections relevant to understand the data obtained with SK. With this configuration the T2K experiment provided key results for the understanding of neutrino oscillation as the first observation of the appearance of electron neutrinos in 2011 or very recently the first accurate measurement of the delta CP phase, suggesting CP violation in the leptonic sector. To improve the results and to provide important input for the next generation of long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, the T2K collaboration decided the T2K-II phase of the experiment. This phase consists of an upgrade of the neutrino beam power and the upgrade of ND280 which will start taking data in 2022.  The upgraded ND280 will include a novel scintillator tracker concept,  SuperFGD. It is a 3D array of 2M cubes of 1x1x1cm^3. Each cube is intersected by 3 wavelength shifting fibres collecting the scintillation light allowing to reconstruct the event in 3D from the three orthogonal projections. A 10k cubes prototype was assembled and tested both with charged particles and neutrons. 

 

Talk outline

In the talk, the benefits of this new neutrino target approach are discussed (stand-alone particle identification, lower detection thresholds, neutrino cross-section with many outgoing particles in the final state, etc) as well as its relevance for the T2K oscillation analysis. Some prototype results will be presented, and new reconstruction and analysis techniques based on SuperFGD will be mentioned.

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