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Development and calibration of NuLat, A new type of neutrino detector

Over the past 20 years, the detection of neutrino oscillation has reported a lot of important results. The oscillation phenomenon itself has been well proved by various experiments. Some oscillation parameters has been measured and now in the area of precise determination. On the other hand, some new questions like the possibility of the existence of light sterile neutrinos and unexpected 5 MeV bump were raised during the measurement. The Neutrino Lattice Experiment (NuLat) is a detector based on the Raghavan Optical Lattice (ROL). It should be able to offer a compact design of an effective detector with good mobility. It can be extremely useful in the short baseline reactor neutrino oscillation detection community to resolve several confusing issues. In this thesis, we present the calibration results we got from the first active NuLat detector and show what kind of improvements we need for the next version of the NuLat detector based on these results. / Ph. D. / During the last century, physicists have developed a nice framework to describe the physics world we live. The model which we called Standard Model has been constructed to describe the behavior of elementary particles and nicely explain the phenomenon we found from various experiments. However there are still a lot mysteries which cannot be explained by this model and more precise measurements on different fields of particle physics are need to help us improve our understanding about this. Neutrino oscillation is one of the most important field related to this kind of concern.

The Neutrino Lattice Experiment (NuLat) is a new type of neutrino detector. It has a good geometry reconstruction ability based on the the Raghavan Optical Lattice (ROL). Since we cannot directly see the elementary particles, we always rely on the signals generated by the reaction between particles and our detector. How to interpret the signals becomes crucial at this point to have high quality experimental data. NuLat is such kind of neutrino detector which offer good ability for us to interpret the signal right. It has a compact design compared to most of other detectors in this field. This is really useful because it can be implemented with limited space where other detectors might have difficulties. Simultaneously the ROL design can help offer nice background rejection ability and high energy resolution.

In this thesis, we discuss the progress about develop and assembly of the first active NuLat detector with the preliminary calibration data which give us basic understanding about the performance of this first version.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/82933
Date27 April 2018
CreatorsDing, Xinjian
ContributorsPhysics, Vogelaar, R. Bruce, Pitt, Mark L., Tao, Chenggang, Heremans, Jean J.
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDissertation
FormatETD, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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