Peering into the life of neutrinos

A collaboration between 17 countries, 730 scientists from 74 universities and national laboratories have worked on it.

At its heart will be a 34.5m diameter acrylic sphere filled with 20,000 tons of liquid scintillator, which will emit photons if neutrinos interact with it – neutrinos sourced from eight existing nuclear reactors in the region.

Collisions emit Cherenkov radiation (red line) and scintillation produces the green line

~45,000 photo multiplier tubes around the sphere will detect such photons.

“The light output of the liquid scintillator, typically >10,000 photons/MeV, ensures a precise determination of the deposited energy,” according to Spectrum Instrumentation. “It would be beneficial if the direction of the incident neutrino could also be reconstructed. Here, the faint but directional Cherenkov light from neutrino’s initial passage through the water is paired to give physicists this information.”

Why is a test equipment company commenting on a physics experiment?

Because Spectrum’s M4i.2212 digitiser cards are being used in lab-scale experiments by teams at the Technical University of Munich and at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz to  characterise the scintillating liquid.

M4i.2212-x8 PCIe digitiser with 1.25Gsample/s on four channels

The same German team is also contributing to the calibration of Juno.