One of the major intellectual achievements of the 20th century was the development of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. This model succeeded in classifying all of the elementary particles known at the time into a hierarchy of groups having similar quantum properties. The validity of this model to date was recently confirmed by the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. However, the Standard Model as it currently exists leaves open many questions about the universe, including such fundamental questions as to why the Higgs mass has the value it has and why there is no antimatter in the universe.
One of the primary areas to search for answers to these and other open questions about the universe, how it came to be and why it is the way it is, is to focus on a study of the properties of neutrinos and to use what we know and can learn about neutrinos as probes of science beyond the Standard Model. Neutrinos are those elementary particles that interact with practically nothing else in the universe. They have no electric charge and were once thought to be massless. Like other elementary particles, they were believed to have an antimatter counterpart, the antineutrino. Moreover, the Standard Model predicted that there were actually three different kinds of neutrinos that were distinguishable through the different interactions that they did undergo whenever there was an interaction.
But recent measurements have totally changed our picture of neutrinos. We now know that neutrinos do have a mass and because they do, they can actually change from one type to another. Detailed measurements of these changes, along with other current neutrino experiments, form one of the most promising ways to probe for new physics beyond the Standard Model.
The achievements of particle physics during the last few decades have been enabled by the progress that has been made in the development and utilization of extremely sophisticated elementary particle detector technology, some of which has resulted in applications that have over time enjoyed spin offs into other areas of science. The primary goal of most of this technology is to reduce the level of noise in the detector to enable increasingly weaker signals to be observed.
There is currently a large interest in experimental particle physics in liquid argon Time Projection Chambers (TPC) spurred in part by the proposed Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) project at Fermi National Acclerator Laboratory (FNAL) and in neutrino physics in general. This award supports the group of C. Bromberg at Michigan State University to work on the construction of a low noise readout system for the Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) to be used in the LArIAT (Liquid Argon In A Test-beam) experiment at FNAL. The unique aspect of these electronics is that it uses cold preamplifiers, cooled by submerging them in Liquid Argon (87 degrees above absolute zero), that reduces electronic noise by 50% compared to room temperature electronics. FNAL is providing the test neutrino beam and associated detectors. This project will focus solely on the fabrication of the cold readout system.
LArTPC detector technology is scalable to the very large masses (perhaps 100kiloTons) needed by next generation neutrino experiments and is capable of recording three-dimensional digital images of particle trajectories. For these experiments systematic errors in the energy measurements are not well known. This project will help understand these errors and a crucial component will be the low-noise electronics.
The broader impact of this work involves training of an engineer in Liquid Argon technology. The PI also contributes to the US Particle Accelerator School using LAr TPCs as teaching tools.
