Speaker
Description
Water-based Liquid Scintillator (WbLS) shows promise as a detector medium offering the advantages of both pure water detectors and conventional liquid scintillator. With the capability of measuring and distinguishing both Cherenkov and scintillation light, it could use the former to measure track direction and particle species while the latter allows a low energy threshold and excellent energy resolution.
Theia is a proposed detector at the 25+ kton scale that would use these capabilities for a broad program of neutrino physics and BSM searches spanning energies from hundreds of keV to a few GeV, including determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy, measurement of the neutrino CP-violating phase, and searches for neutrinoless double beta decay and proton decay. If deployed as a far detector module for the DUNE project, it would also complement the liquid argon program by providing a way to disentangle flux and cross section systematics through interactions on a different nuclear target. I will present the Theia concept, current R&D efforts with WbLS, and the ongoing studies aiming to demonstrate Theia’s suitability as DUNE far detector 4.
