MicroBooNE (Micro Booster-beam Neutrino Experiment)
MicroBooNE is a particle
detector to be built at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, also known
as Fermilab. It will make use of liquid-argon time projection chamber (LArTPC)
technology. The basic idea behind this technology is that in the event of a
charged particle moving through the large volume of liquid argon, it will
ionize the argon atoms as they pass by. The resulting expelled electrons drift
through the detector volume under the influence of a strong electric field (500
V/cm in the case of MicroBooNE.) These moving electrons make their way to a set
of wire planes that collect data. From this information, the initial event can
be reconstructed with extremely high resolution.
The goal of
MicroBooNE is to detect events from a beam of muon-neutrinos and determine what
flavor of neutrino caused the interaction to see the frequency of flavor
change. The frequencies of different flavors of neutrino events will then be
compared to calculated probabilities to measure the mixing angle.
For more
information about LArTPC’s, you can look at these previous experiments that
made use of the technology:
ß MicroBooNe detector (Grad student for scale)