Development of a large size liquid argon TPC toward a neutrino interaction measurement

2020 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 18K03684
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Review Section: Basic Section 15020:Experimental studies related to particle-, nuclear-, cosmic ray and astro-physics
• Research Institution: High Energy Accelerator Research Organization
• Principal Investigator: Sakashita Ken 大学共同利用機関法人高エネルギー加速器研究機構, 素粒子原子核研究所, 准教授 (50435616)
• Project Period (FY): 2018-04-01 – 2021-03-31
• Keywords: ニュートリノ / 液体アルゴンTPC

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The development of a large size "Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LAr TPC)" was studied. In this study, we developed a dual-phase liquid-argon TPC to realize a high signal-to-noise ratio. We successfully achieved to observe a signal from cosmic-ray muon events in which the signal gain was about 9 with the dual-phase TPC. On the other hand, we also turned out that a electrical discharge of the large area GEM boards is one of serious problem toward the realization of large size LArTPC. We plan to develop a GEM using a high resistive material in order to resolve this problem.
In parallel with the dual-phase readout R&D, we also developed an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that can read out a large size signal without any saturation and keeping a low noise. It was confirmed that the ASIC satisfied the requirements from the detector such as a dynamic range and amount of internal noise as predicted by the simulation.

Free Research Field

素粒子実験

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

ニュートリノ原子核反応の理解は、ニュートリノ振動の全容解明にむけて事前に解決すべきステップである。液体アルゴンTPCは、反応から放出される荷電粒子の飛跡を3次元で詳細に捉え高い粒子識別やエネルギー測定能力によりニュートリノ原子核反応を詳細に調べることができるが、実際の実験に必要な大型化に課題がある。本研究成果を基に、液体アルゴンTPCの大型化にむけた課題の１つ、高い信号-雑音比での信号読み出しが可能になった。また、本研究で開発する検出器技術開発は、他の素粒子原子核の測定器や、医療用イメージングデバイスへの応用も可能である。