Detection of low energy solar neutrinos by a two-phase cryogenic e-bubble detector

摘要

A new two-phase cryogenic neutrino detector using electron bubble (e-bubble) specifically in liquid helium is proposed and being developed for real time, high rate measurements of low-energy p-p reaction neutrinos from the sun. The e-bubble detector is a time projection chamber-like (TPC) tracking detector. The task of such a neutrino detector is to detect the ionization of the elastically scattered target electrons by incident neutrinos, and then to characterize their energy and direction and to distinguish them from radioactive backgrounds. The ionization signals are expected to be small and hence undergo avalanche amplification in the saturated vapor above the liquid phase by gas electron multipliers (GEMs) at high gain. Higher granularity and intrinsically suppressed ion feedback give a good spatial resolution and are the major advantages of this technology. It should be possible to construct such a detector to track charged particles down to 100—200 keV in a massive liquid helium target with fractional millimeter spatial resolution in three-dimensional space, using the GEM-based TPC with a high-resolution CCD camera, for both the electronic and light readout.