On Friday, October 19, 2018, Anne CHAPPUIS, a Ph.D. candidate in Subatomic and Astroparticle Physics atthe Annecy Laboratory of Particle Physics (LAPP), will defend her thesis titled “Study and Simulation of Scintillation Light Produced and Propagating in a Two-Phase Liquid Argon Drift Chamber, in the Context of the DUNE Project.”
The defense will take place at 2:00 p.m. in the Marcel Vivargent Auditorium at LAPP on the Annecy campus.
Thesis summary
The DUNE project is a long-distance neutrino oscillation experiment dedicated in particular to determining the neutrino mass hierarchy and measuring the CP violation phase involved in the oscillation mechanism. This project consists of a 1,300-kilometer-long high-intensity neutrino beam and a massive detector containing over 40 kilotons of liquid argon, based on liquid argon drift chamber (LArTPC) technology. Two versions of this technology are currently under development, leading to the installation at CERN of two prototypes, whose construction is expected to be completed by the end of 2018. The work presented in this thesis is part of the ProtoDUNE-DP project, which aims to demonstrate the feasibility of so-called “two-phase” technology—i.e., using both liquid and gaseous argon—for LArTPCs of this scale. Two main signals are expected in such a detector: a charge signal and a light signal from scintillation. The light signal can be used in the data acquisition trigger system, in the identification and possibly the rejection of signals due to cosmic muons, and for high-precision calorimetric measurements. Preliminary simulations of this signal are therefore necessary to understand its characteristics and to develop identification algorithms. This thesis focuses in particular on the development of this simulation and on the study of the propagation of scintillation photons within the detector. The various mechanisms of scintillation light production, the simulation developed during this thesis, and the studies conducted on the propagation of scintillation light in ProtoDUNE-DP will be presented. These simulations were also compared with data collected using a dual-phase pre-prototype installed at CERN in 2017, in order to test the validity of the simulation and refine its various parameters.