Building Small, Thinking Fast, Dreaming Big: New Technologies for Future Neutrino Experiments

The neutrino physics community faces stark technological tradeoffs between conventional detectors that offer large target volumes but poor resolution, and advanced, high-resolution detector systems with limited scalability. In this talk, Wetstein presents a third way. By fundamentally reinventing the photodetector, it becomes possible to develop high-resolution Water Cherenkov (WCh) or scintillation-based neutrino detectors capable of more complete event reconstruction using precision measurements of the positions and drift times of optical photons. He will give a brief overview of the Large Area Picosecond Photodetector (LAPPD) project, an effort to develop compact, microchannel plate (MCP) photomultiplier tubes capable of sub-millimeter, sub-nanosecond spatial resolutions and with potential for scalability to large experiments. He will also discuss a first effort to realize LAPPDs in a neutrino experiment at Fermilab: the Atmospheric Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE). ANNIE is designed to measure the abundance of final-state neutrons produced by neutrinos in water, an important measurement for future neutrino and proton decay analyses. Finally, he will present some thoughts on the long-term implications of new water and scintillation-based technology for next-generation experiments approaching megaton-scales.