The DUNE dual-phase liquid argon TPC

Abstract

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a long-baseline project studying an accelerator-made neutrino beam produced at Fermilab. DUNE consists of two detectors placed in the path of the neutrino beam, one near the source and one at the Stanford Underground Research Facility, at a distance of 1300 km and protected by a 1500 m rock overburden. Fundamental features of neutrino oscillation physics, such as leptonic CP violation and the neutrino mass hierarchy, as well as supernovae and proton decay physics will be studied with high precision during more than 10 years of data taking, starting in 2026. The far detector technology consists of four 60 × 12 × 12 m3 time-projecting chambers (TPC), each module having 10 kT of liquid argon (LAr) fiducial mass. Two designs are currently under study for the far detector: one with only liquid argon (Single-Phase), the other containing a small volume of gaseous argon at the top of the active volume (Dual-Phase). Both designs are currently being tested with 6 × 6 × 6 m3 prototypes at CERN. Regarding Dual-Phase, all aspects of the detectors have the same size as those for the final far detector except for the drift length (6 m against 12 m). This paper focuses on the way we collect and analyze the ionization signal in the Dual-Phase prototype (ProtoDUNE-DP).