New tools for discovery and nuclear non-proliferation: WATCHMAN and SANDD.

by Dr Viacheslav Li (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

Thursday Aug 15, 2019, 3:30 PM → 4:30 PM Pacific/Honolulu

watanabe Hall112

How to combine fundamental research with global nuclear non-proliferation efforts? In this talk, we focus on two detectors currently under construction: the far-field WATer CHerenkov Monitor for AntiNeutrinos (WATCHMAN) and the near-field Segmented AntiNeutrino Directional Detector (SANDD), which are both proof-of-concept projects. The former is to test Gd-doped water-Cherenkov technology for monitoring of a single nuclear reactor complex at a 26-km distance. The latter is to utilize recent advances in Li6-doped pulse-shape-sensitive plastic scintillators developed at LLNL and silicon-photomultiplier (SiPM) arrays, to obtain cm-scale position resolution for inverse-beta-decay directionality and PSD for identifying backgrounds caused by fast neutrons.
We present an update on the WATCHMAN project, and recent progress on testing the first two prototypes of SANDD --- 64 rods of PSD plastic scintillator (with and without Li6 doping) instrumented with two SiPM arrays, which are read-out by a 128-channel full-waveform DAQ system. The near-term plan along with recent developments in fast-/thermal-neutron detectors will also be briefly discussed.
The talk is based on recent reports:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11668
https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.08891