On Friday, October 19, 2018, Anne CHAPPUIS, PhD student in Subatomic and Astroparticle Physics at the Annecy Laboratory of Particle Physics (LAPP), will present her thesis "Study and simulation of scintillation light produced and propagating in a liquid argon double-phase drift chamber, in the context of the DUNE project".
The defense will take place at 2pm, in the Marcel Vivargent auditorium, at the LAPP, on the Annecy campus.
Summary of the thesis
The DUNE project is a long-distance neutrino beam oscillation experiment, dedicated in particular to determining the neutrino mass hierarchy and measuring the CP violation phase involved in the oscillation mechanism. The project consists of an intense 1300 km neutrino beam and a massive detector containing over 40 kilotons of liquid argon, based on liquid argon drift chamber (LArTPC) technology. Two approaches to this technology are currently under development, leading to the installation of two prototypes at CERN, with construction scheduled for completion by the end of 2018. The work presented in this thesis is part of the ProtoDUNE-DP project, which aims to prove the feasibility of so-called "dual-phase" technology, i.e. using liquid and gaseous argon, for LArTPCs of this scale. Two main signals are expected in such a detector, a charge signal and a scintillation light signal. The light signal can be used in the data acquisition trigger system, for identification and possible rejection of the signal due to cosmic muons, and for precision calorimetric measurements. Prior simulations of this signal are therefore necessary in order to understand its particularities and develop identification algorithms. This thesis focuses in particular on the development of this simulation and on the study of scintillation photon propagation within the detector. The various scintillation light generation mechanisms, the simulation developed during this thesis and the studies carried out on scintillation light propagation in ProtoDUNE-DP will be presented. These simulations could also be compared with data collected with a double-phase pre-prototype installed at CERN in 2017, in order to test the validity of the simulation and improve its various parameters.