Description
Upon the neutrino discovery by Reines & Cowan (1956), they also paved the ground behind much of today’s neutrino detection technology. Large instrumented volumes for neutrino detection have been achieved via a key (implicit) principle: detection medium transparency and high purity. Many other technologies, such as noble liquid/gases TPCs rely on a similar basis. Reines-based technology has yielded historical success over several decades, including several Nobel prizes, where the discovery of the neutrino oscillation phenomenon — an important modification of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Despite the stunning success, the “transparent technology”, like the pioneering liquid scintillator detectors, this technology is known to suffer from key limitations such as little (or none) topological particle identification (PID) ability, typically enabling active background rejection. Solving this issue, while keeping the detector scalability for neutrino, has long remained an impossible challenge. Hence, the only way to reduce those otherwise overwhelming backgrounds today is via an expensive passive shielding strategy, including in some cases going kilometres deep underground.
In this presentation, we shall introduce the novel LiquidO technology, under final stages of R&D demonstration, whose rationale exploits detection in media of extreme opacity, thus breaking with the need for transparency. LiquidO main goal is to yield unprecedented event-wise “sub-atomic imaging” that can be exploited for active PID, thus allowing the active tagging of background events and enabling the relaxation of passive shielding; i.e. less deep underground laboratories dependency. LiquidO working principle was conceived in 2013, while released in mid-2019, upon the first detection proof-of-principle, and now published in Communication Physics (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-021-00763-5). The technology is developed by an international scientific consortium with 70 scientists in 22 institutions over 10 countries.
