Upgrade of the ICARUS T600 Time Projection Chamber

Abstract

The ICARUS T600 detector, with about 500 tons of active mass, is the largest Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LAr TPC) ever realised. In 2013 ICARUS concluded an about 4 years long experiment with the T600 detector at the LNGS underground laboratory, taking data both with the CNGS neutrino beam and cosmic rays. This very successful experiment demonstrated the high spatial and energy resolutions, electron/photon separation and particle identification capabilities (via dE/dx vs range measurements) of the LAr technology.ICARUS Collaboration refurbished the T600 at CERN, in order to move it to FNAL in the framework of the SBN experiment, to serve as far detector in studies on the short baseline neutrino oscillations.A fundamental part of ICARUS is the light collection system, made of 360 Hamamatsu R5912-MOD, 8 in. diameter, PMT’s. This system is dedicated to three tasks: the generation of a light based trigger signal, the identification of the time of occurrence (t0) of each interaction with high time precision and the initial recognition of event topology for fast event selection purposes.