Seminars

Ana Sofia Inacio: “SNO+: Ton-scale Search for Double Beta Decay”

Name: Ana Sofia Inacio: “SNO+: Ton-scale Search for Double Beta Decay”
Start: 2021-03-29T16:00:00+01:00
End: 2021-03-29T17:00:00+01:00
Location: No location set

Monday 29 Mar 2021, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/London

Description

SNO+ is a large volume liquid scintillator experiment for neutrino physics located in the SNOLAB underground laboratory in Sudbury, Canada. Using the 12 m diameter acrylic vessel and the PMT array of the SNO detector, SNO+ has the primary physics goal of searching for the neutrinoless double-beta decay of the isotope 130Te. In Phase I, the detector will be loaded with 0.5% natural tellurium, corresponding to 1330 kg of 130Te for a sensitivity to the effective Majorana neutrino mass in the inverted hierarchy region. Additionally, SNO+ aims to measure reactor antineutrino oscillations, solar neutrinos, and geoneutrinos, to be sensitive to supernova neutrinos, and to search for exotic physics.

SNO+ acquired data as a kiloton-scale pure-water Cherenkov detector between May 2017 and June 2019. With the initial data set, SNO+ measured 8B solar neutrinos with low backgrounds, set world-leading limits on invisible modes of (di)nucleon decay and measured the highest neutron detection efficiency among pure water Cherenkov detectors. Additionally, the completed water phase was crucial to calibrate detector components and measure the intrinsic levels of radioactivity in the detector materials, yielding valuable knowledge for the next stages of the experiment. Currently, SNO+ is almost completely filled with liquid scintillator and the double-beta decay phase is expected to start in 2022. In this seminar I will give a general introduction to the SNO+ experiment, and describe the results from the water phase, and present the prospects for the next phases.