SBND

People

Dr. John Marshall, Dr. Xianguo Lu, Dr. Andy Chappell, Alex Wilkinson

Overview

The Short Baseline Near Detector (SBND) is a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) detector in the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at Fermilab. Neutrinos from the BNB are incident on SBND's active volume of 112-tons of liquid argon. When a neutrino interacts with an argon nuclei, the LArTPC detector technology is able to image the outgoing charged particles. This image can be reconstructed to infer the incident neutrino's properties and so allow us to study the elusive neutrinos. Below is an example of such a detector image:

Detector construction and installation spanned 2017 to 2024. Here is an image of the detector being lowered into its cryostat (argon is liquid at temperatures below -186C) in 2023:

SBND measured its first neutrinos in 2024, embarking on a journey that will see over 1 million neutrino interactions recorded per year. This is a huge dataset in the world of neutrino physics and will facilitate a rich physics programme. SBND will participate in the Short Baseline Neutrino Programme (SBN) study of neutrino oscillations as well making world-leading measurements of neutrino-argon interactions that are important for future neutrino experiments such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).

SBND at Warwick

The focus of the SBND group at Warwick is the development of the Pandora LArTPC event reconstruction. Pandora uses a mixture of traditional and deep-learning methods of pattern recognition to reconstruct the particle content of interactions at SBND. The group at Warwick also contributes to the operation of SBND through leadership in the detector control and monitoring software.