Quantum Dots and Particle Direction Reconstruction in Liquid Scintillators

by Dr Christoph Aberle (UCLA Physics and Astronomy)

Tuesday Sep 17, 2013, 3:00 PM → 4:00 PM Pacific/Honolulu

420 (Watanabe hall)

The search for neutrinoless double-beta decay is currently one of the most important experimental tasks in neutrino physics. Liquid scintillator detectors have proven to be very successful in neutrino physics. Major results, for example the measurements of the mixing angle θ13 in 2012, have been obtained using this technique. This talk covers two recent developments towards the improvement of scintillator-photodetector systems. First, nanotechnology may hold the key to improving liquid scintillators. Quantum dots have unique, tunable optical properties and they can be made from candidate isotopes for neutrinoless double beta decay. Requirements and optical characterizations of quantum-dot-doped liquid scintillators are presented. Second, a possibility of significantly improving the capabilities of scintillator detectors is direction reconstruction for charged particles. Direction information would be a powerful handle in background suppression when searching for rare processes. Simulation results are presented, analyzing detector advances in timing, photodetector spectral response, and scintillator emission spectra. It is shown that the early directional Cerenkov light can be potentially separated from the much more abundant scintillation light even at low electron energies of several MeV.