Abstract
Liquid Argon (LAr) is one of the most widely used scintillators in particle detection, due to its low cost, high availability and excellent scintillation properties. A large number of experiments in the neutrino sector are based around using LAr in one or more Time Projection Chambers (TPCs), leading to high resolution three-dimensional particle reconstruction. In this paper, we review and summarise a number of these Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) experiments, and briefly describe the specific technologies that they currently employ. This includes single phase LAr experiments (ICARUS T600, MicroBooNE, SBND, LArIAT, DUNE-SP, ProtoDUNE-SP, ArgonCube and Vertical Drift) and dual phase LAr experiments (DUNE-DP, WA105, ProtoDUNE-DP and ARIADNE). We also discuss some new avenues of research in the field of LArTPC readout, which show potential for wide-scale use in the near future.
Highlights
It has been 90 years since Wolfgang Pauli first proposed the existence of particles which he described as “electrically neutral ... that have spin 1/2 and obey the exclusion principle and that further differ from light quanta in that they do not travel with the velocity of light” [1]
Proposed in 1985 [13], the Imaging Cosmic And Rare Underground Signals (ICARUS) program has pioneered many of the techniques for single- and dual-phase Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) detector design, assembly and operation that are used by all other experiments operating today
Recent advances in the design and manufacturing of large-area THGEMs (“Thick Gaseous Electron Multipliers”—a type of micropattern detector that is widely used as the anode in dual-phase Time Projection Chambers (TPCs), and discussed in more detail in Section 3) have allowed for the development of a new type of anode plane that has been proposed for use on a future VD detector: a perforated PCB anode [62]
Summary
It has been 90 years since Wolfgang Pauli first proposed the existence of particles which he described as “electrically neutral ... that have spin 1/2 and obey the exclusion principle and that further differ from light quanta in that they do not travel with the velocity of light” [1]. Argon is the most abundant noble gas on Earth, constituting 0.934% of the atmosphere’s volume [4], and is commercially extracted, liquefied and purified at large scales worldwide, making it relatively cheap and plentiful. It scintillates in the vacuum ultraviolet (“VUV”) wavelength range, with a peak emission at approximately 128 nm [5,6], and in its liquid phase has a relatively high scintillation yield (that is, the amount of light emitted per unit of energy deposited by the incident ionising radiation) of the order of 40,000 photons per MeV [3,7]. This paper will review the detection and design principles, primary hardware and status of a number of currently and recently operating single-phase (Section 2) and dual-phase (Section 3) LArTPCs, as well as a selection of developing technologies that could potentially be used in future experiments
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