High Energy Physics Seminar
9 September 2013, Room: D-122, Time: 2:00 PM
"Liquid Scintillator for Physics Frontiers"
Dr. Minfang Yeh
Brookhaven National Laboratory
The challenges of liquid scintillator for physics frontier research are summarized in this talk. Liquid scintillator has played a key role in the history of neutrino physics since the first direct detection of antineutrinos by Reines and Cowan in 1956. Key parameters for research and development are chemical stability, long attenuation length, high photon yield, and low intrinsic radioactivity. With the recently revealed large value of the q13 mixing parameter, various topics ranging from determination of neutrino mass hierarchy via oscillation or neutrino-less double beta-decay to studies of proton decay, astrophysical and supernova neutrinos have been proposed for potential deployment in the next decades. The various experiments pose different technical challenges, of which some are common across detectors while others require detector-specific research and development. Scintillator requirements and developments for a variety of these experiments are described. The application of new scintillation liquids that exhibit high flash point and low reactivity (i.e. linear alkylbenzene, LAB) and are cost-effective with nontoxic liquid handling (i.e. water-based liquid scintillator, WbLS) to the future scintillator-based experiments, will be discussed.