LBNE Science Collaboration
As of January 2013, more than 350 scientists and engineers from more than 60 institutions participate in the LBNE Science Collaboration. The collaborators come from universities and national laboratories, including collaborators from the United States, India, Italy, Japan, and the UK. Collaborators encourage and anticipate further international participation.
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Professor Robert Wilson (left) from Colorado State University and Dr. Milind Diwan (right) from Brookhaven National Laboratory are serving as the scientific co-spokespersons for the collaboration. Members of the collaboration are working closely with the LBNE Project team to design the experimental facilities. A more detailed view of the collaboration organizational structure is also available. The collaboration has developed a vision statement to help guide its efforts through the design phase of the projects. |
Collaboration Vision Statement
The primary goal of this collaboration is to perform a world-leading long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment that will reach unprecedented sensitivity and precision for addressing the neutrino mass hierarchy, CP violation in neutrino mixing, and the value of the mixing parameter &theta13. This experiment will require the development and construction of new facilities which could also provide new capabilities to search for nucleon decay, observe neutrinos emitted by supernovae in our galaxy and beyond, and other important topics in physics and astrophysics.
The experiment concept includes a high-intensity neutrino beam generated at Fermilab and a large underground detector facility at the Homestake mine in Lead, South Dakota. The neutrino beam will be generated by a high-power proton beam that exceeds present capabilities, and the neutrino beam configuration must be optimized for the baseline and neutrino oscillation parameters. We have identified two detector technologies with the potential to achieve our science goals: a water Cerenkov detector (WCD) and a liquid argon (LAr) time projection chamber. The collaboration envisions a detector with a mass on the order of 100 kilotons for WCD and several kilotons for LAr. An ideal experiment might be a mixture of WCD and LAr detectors due to their complementary capabilities.
Achieving these goals will require an extension of present-day technologies on a challenging time-scale to ensure that the U.S. program maintains a competitive advantage. Our current anticipated schedule is to be ready for a DOE Critical Decision-1 review in spring of 2012. This schedule requires vigorous R&D and engineering efforts toward development of the beamline and both WCD and LAr detector technologies.
