Opportunities and challenges to study solar neutrinos with a Q-Pix pixel readout
Opportunities and challenges to study solar neutrinos with a Q-Pix pixel readout
- Event time: 4:00pm until 5:00pm
- Event date: 21st November 2025
- Speaker: Dr Miguel Ángel García-Peris (University of Manchester)
- Location: Room 4325B, James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB) James Clerk Maxwell Building Peter Guthrie Tait Road Edinburgh EH9 3FD GB
Event details
The study of solar neutrinos presents significant opportunities in astrophysics, nuclear physics, and particle physics. However, the low-energy nature of these neutrinos introduces considerable challenges to isolate them from background events, requiring detectors with low-energy threshold, high spatial and energy resolutions, and low data rate. We present the study of solar neutrinos with a kiloton-scale liquid argon detector located underground, instrumented with a pixel readout using the Q-Pix technology. We explore the potential of using volume fiducialization, directional topological information, light signal coincidence and pulse-shape discrimination to enhance solar neutrino sensitivity. We find that discriminating neutrino signals below 5 MeV is very difficult. However, we show that these methods are useful for the detection of solar neutrinos when external backgrounds are sufficiently understood and when the detector is built using low-background techniques. When building a workable background model for this study, we identify γ background from the cavern walls and from capture of α particles in radon decay chains as both critical to solar neutrino sensitivity and significantly underconstrained by existing measurements. Finally, we highlight that the main advantage of the use of Q-Pix for solar neutrino studies lies in its ability to enable the continuous readout of all low-energy events with minimal data rates and manageable storage for further offline analyses.
About Experimental Particle Physics seminars
The experimental particle physics seminar series invites speakers from all over Europe to discuss the latest developments at the LHC, accelerator and non-accelerator based neutrino physics, hardware R&D and astroparticle physics. .
