Speaker
Description
In commonly used liquid Argon time projection chambers, charged particle tracks are reconstructed with a good spatial resolution employing the charge signal, while the scintillation light signal is used only for determining the interaction time or for calorimetry. However, LAr scintillation yield is very high, and the possibility to fully exploit the scintillation signal was considered to heavily enhance the time resolution of the detected events while keeping the high position resolution.
An innovative liquid Argon optical detector is under development for imaging charged particle tracks emitted from neutrino interaction events inside GRAIN, the liquid Argon target of SAND in the DUNE Near Detector Complex.
Thanks to the innovative UV cameras, fast scintillation light in LAr can be focused by a proper optical system into a high granularity 32x32 Silicon Photo-Multiplier (SiPM) matrix with SiPMs of 2 mm side. One possibility for the optical systems is based on a UV cryogenics lens. The lens design is optimized for focusing tracks crossing a volume between 40 and 100 cm from the lens plane, and the first UV camera prototype with a 16x16 SiPM matrix has been built and is under testing in the ARTIC facility at the University of Genova.
In this talk, the preliminary design of the lens-based optical detector will be discussed, and the first results achieved with the prototypes will be shown, together with the expected performances of neutrino event reconstruction in GRAIN.
