Physics Club: Flavio Cavanna, Fermilab/Yale University, “From LArIAT to ProtoDUNE: a new way to look at hadron interactions through the “eyes” of the Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber”

Event time: 
Monday, October 10, 2016 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Location: 
Sloane Physics Laboratory (SPL), 57 See map
217 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT 06511
(Location is wheelchair accessible)
Event description: 

The LArIAT experiment, a small LArTPC exposed to charged particle beams at FERMILAB, opened the way of (re)investigating hadron interaction mechanisms with the new powerful technology chosen for the long- and short-baseline Neutrino Program in the US. Different topologies in the recorded event sample can be clearly identified providing surprisingly immediate insight about the interaction mechanism at the origin of the event, the first step of sophisticated, fully automated analyses. Now, a new X-large LArTPC is going to be exposed to charged particle beams at the CERN Neutrino Platform. It is called ProtoDUNE and prototypes at a 1:1 scale the designs of the detector components of DUNE, the future long-baseline neutrino experiment. The unprecedented event reconstruction capability of the LArTPC will be combined with a sufficiently large active volume to fully contain the hadronic and electromagnetic interaction products in the few GeV energy range. “TPC/imaging-aided calorimetric measurements” will thus allow investigation of energy deposition mechanisms even when the standard hadronic and electromagnetic shower concepts and features are either not well defined or cannot be applied.