DUNE

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) at the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) is a next generation neutrino experiment planning to build a very large scale 40 kt LAr detector to provide unprecedented sensitivity to study neutrinos. The very large detector will be located at the Stanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) at a baseline of 1300 km from the Fermilab neutrino beam. DUNE proposes an immense scientific program and will answer many of the great questions of neutrino physics.

Black Hole Formation

The Mainz group is contributing to the near detectors of the DUNE complex, which are essential to understand the properties of the neutrino beam and how neutrinos interact with argon. We are involved in the development of the TMS near detector design and reconstruction algorithms, as well as the development of analyses using the PRISM approach of the near detector complex.

TMS is a muon spectrometer which will be positioned behind the liquid argon detector ND-LAr. Its job is to "catch" nigh energetic muons that leave ND-LAr and determine their energy and charge. The muons are detected by layers of scintillator bars. In between the scintillation layers, there are layers of magnetized steel. The steel serves to bend the tracks slightly, so their charge can be measured. The thick steel layers also absorb a lot of energy, stopping the muons in the detector. The muon energy is inferred from the total length of the muon track.

In the PRISM approach, the near detector is made movable, allowing us to take data at different angles w.r.t. the beam axis, and thus in different neutrino energy spectra. Using the same detector in different beams allows us to disentangle the effects of beam uncertainties and interactions uncertainties, which usually are very hard to distinguish in a single detector in a single beam. By building linear combinations of the data taking in different fluxes, one can create "virtual measurements" in virtual fluxes that correspond to the same linear combination. This can then be used to "simulate" the oscillated beam at the far detector, or to do cross section measurements in different virtual beams.