DUNE

The DUNE experiment will probe the ultimate frontier in neutrino oscillation physics. Like MicroBooNE, the experiment will be designed for liquid-argon time projection chambers—LArTPCs—to make the primary measurements. And as with NOvA, the basic goal is to look for neutrino oscillations by comparing measurements of neutrino interactions in Near and Far Detectors in a neutrino beam.

But the DUNE experiment will turn the concept up to unprecedented scales. The Far Detector will actually be four Far Detectors: each “module” will be roughly the size of the NOvA Far Detector, consisting of about 10,000 tons of argon, by far the largest LArTPCs ever built. They will be assembled nearly a mile underground in a refurbished gold mine at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota. The Near Detector will also be a multi-detector concept, including a new pixel-based, modular LArTPC design coupled to a muon spectrometer, which together will be mobile, moving up to 35m transverse to the beam axis to study how neutrino interactions vary as a function of the neutrino beam energy. And the LBNF neutrino beam driving the experiment will be the most intense accelerator neutrino beam ever constructed.

The Tufts group currently maintains leadership roles in the development of the Near Detector complex’s muon detector, TMS (Prof. Gallagher) and in the Long-Baseline oscillation physics working group (Prof. Wolcott), as well as computing infrastructure for analysis (Prof. Wolcott). Our group also participates in reconstruction & data analysis for the “2×2” liquid argon near detector prototype at Fermilab.