The Road to Hybrid Neutrino Detection with Theia

by Michael Wurm

Tuesday 16 Sept 2025, 15:00 → 17:00 US/Eastern

small seminar room

New developments in liquid scintillators, fast photon detectors and chromatic photon sorting open the possibility for the next-generation hybrid neutrino experiment Theia. Based on the capability to discriminate Cherenkov and scintillation signals, Theia will observe particle direction and species using Cherenkov photons, while offering excellent energy resolution and the low threshold of a scintillator detector. Crucially, the hybrid Chernekov-scintillation signal provides new ways of background discrimination not available in conventional detectors. With ANNIE, EOS and the BNL prototypes, these capabilities are explored by a suite of US-based demonstrator detectors.

Hybrid detector technology provides Theia with a wide range of physics objectives: observation of low-energy neutrinos from astrophysical sources like the Sun and Supernovae, the search for leptonic CP-violation in a neutrino beam and last but not least a search for NeutrinoLess Double Beta Decay with sensitivity reaching the normal ordering regime of neutrino mass phase space.

This talk will review the physics of Theia, the envisaged layout of a future Theia detector, and the status of the current ton-scale demonstrators.

 

Zoom link: https://fnal.zoom.us/j/99187704162?pwd=W4SEOsDY8y8GqFnoO6YxtSINg13hNr.1