Speaker
Description
The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a multi-purpose experiment under construction in southern China, expecting to begin data taking in 2023. The detector consists of a target mass of $2 \cdot 10^7\,$kg of an organic liquid scintillator contained in a spherical acrylic vessel, which is located about 650$\,$m underground and submerged in a water pool to shield it from environmental radioactivity. The water pool serves also as an active Cherenkov detector for muon veto.
JUNO is a homogeneous calorimeter able to detect (anti)neutrinos from various natural and artificial sources. The scintillation and Cherenkov light emitted after the interaction of (anti)neutrinos with the liquid scintillator is seen by a compound system of 20-inch large-PMTs and 3-inch small-PMTs, with a total photo-coverage of 78$\,$%; a large photo-coverage is essential to reach a light yield greater than 1300 photoelectrons (PE) per MeV of deposited energy. A dual calorimetry technique is developed based on the presence of the two independent photosensor systems which are characterized by different average light level regimes, resulting in different dynamic ranges: the small-PMT system relies mainly on photon-counting with PMTs operating primarily in the single-photoelectron regime; on the other hand, the large-PMT system relies on charge measurement, with each PMT operating in the 0 to 100 PE range. Thanks to this novel technique, the high light yield, and in combination with a comprehensive multiple-source and multiple-positional calibration campaign, JUNO is expected to reach energy-related systematic uncertainties below 1$\,$% and an effective energy resolution of 3$\,$% at 1$\,$MeV.
Thanks to its competitive characteristics, JUNO will be able to address many topics in neutrino and astroparticle physics. JUNO will provide precise energy measurement of reactor antineutrinos, solar neutrinos, and geo-neutrinos at the MeV scale, and good track reconstruction of GeV-scale events, from, e.g., atmospheric neutrinos.
In the talk, I will present an overview of the JUNO detector and the status of the construction, along with the most significant physics results that can be achieved.
