Very Short Baseline Oscillation Experiment with the miniTimeCube - VESBOM

by Mr Joshua Murillo (Physics and Astronomy, U. Hawaii)

Tuesday Oct 23, 2012, 3:00 PM → 4:00 PM Pacific/Honolulu

The mini-Time Cube (mTC) is a next generation prototype electron anti-neutrino detector of reactor born neutrinos, designed to utilize cutting edge electronics and very fast phototubes to replace more traditional optical measurements with timing measurements, hence “Time Cube”. The mTC is portable and extremely compact, in comparison to neutrino detectors common today because of much greater efficiency. The mTC is meant to deployed with little or no shielding from background. The small size of the detector's two liter volume lends itself to reducing these backgrounds. However, significant (multi-level) triggering capabilities need to be implemented in order to reject muon, gamma and neutron backgrounds in real time. This, in addition to other background considerations will be discussed. The current status of the mTC (including progress on the construction of the custom-electronics) will be discussed. We explore the mTC's unique capability to perform oscillation measurements in a base-line regime that has yet to be probed, 1 - 9 meters from reactor core. The most basic measurement to be done is to count the amount of electron anti-neutrinos emitted by a reactor core as a function of distance and energy (L/E), and compare this to detailed simulations of the particular reactor core and the mTC itself. The key to observation of the hypothetical new "sterile" neutrino is a sinusoidal modulation of the spectrum as a function of L/E. Appropriate reactor types and particular reactors will be presented. This proposed project represents one application of the mTC; further Physics applications of the detector will be presented.