A. Habig

SNEWS: the SuperNova Early Warning System

This paper provides a technical description of the SuperNova Early Warning System (SNEWS), an international network of experiments with the goal of providing an early warning of a galactic supernova.

HALO – the helium and lead observatory for supernova neutrinos

The Helium and Lead Observatory (HALO) is a supernova neutrino detector under development for construction at SNOLAB. It is intended to fulfill a niche as a long term, low cost, high livetime, and low maintenance, dedicated supernova detector. It will be constructed from 80 tonnes of lead, from the decommissioning of the Deep River Cosmic Ray Station, and instrumented with approximately 384 meters of 3He neutron detectors from the final phase of the SNO experiment. Charged- and Neutral-Current neutrino interactions in lead expel neutrons from the lead nuclei making a burst of detected neutrons the signature for the detection of a supernova. Existing neutrino detectors are mostly of the water Cerenkov and liquid scintillator types, which are primarily sensitive to electron anti-neutrinos via charged-current interactions on the hydrogen nuclei in these materials. By contrast, the large neutron excess of a heavy nucleus like Pb acts to Pauli-block pn transitions induced by electron anti-neutrinos, making HALO primarily sensitive to electron neutrinos. While any supernova neutrino data would provide an invaluable window into supernova dynamics, the electron neutrino CC channel has interesting sensitivity to particle physics through flavour-swapping and spectral splitting due to MSW-like collective neutrino-neutrino interactions in the core of the supernova, the only place in the universe where there is a sufficient density of neutrinos for this to occur. Such data could provide a test for θ13 ≠ 0 and an inverted neutrino mass hierarchy. In addition, the ratio of 1-neutron to 2-neutron events would be a measure of the temperature of the cooling neutron star. For the 80 tonne detector, a supernova at 10 kpc is estimated to produce 43 detected neutrons in the absence of collective ν-ν interactions, and many more in their presence. The high neutrino cross-section and low neutron absorption cross-section of lead, along with the modest cost of lead, makes this technology scalable and a future upgrade, to of order 1 kilotonne, is under active consideration.

The atmospheric charged kaon/pion ratio using seasonal variation methods

Observed since the 1950’s, the seasonal effect on undergrou nd muons is a well studied phenomenon. The interaction height of incident cosmic rays changes as the temperature of the atmosphere changes, which affects the production height of mesons (mostly pions and kaons). The decay of these mesons produces muons that can be detected underground. The production of muons is dominated by pion decay, and previous work did not include the effect of kaons. In this work, the methods of Barrett and MACRO are extended to include the effect of kaons. These efforts give rise to a new method to measure the atmospheric K/� ratio at energies beyond the reach of current fixed target exp eriments. These methods were applied to data from the MINOS far detector. A method is developed for making these measurements at other underground detectors, including OPERA, Super-K, IceCube, Baksan and the MINOS near detector.

CHerenkov detectors In mine PitS (CHIPS) Letter of Intent to FNAL

This Letter of Intent outlines a proposal to build a large, yet cost-effective, 100 kton fiducial mass water Cherenkov detector that will initially run in the NuMI beam line. The CHIPS detector (CHerenkov detector In Mine PitS) will be deployed in a flooded mine pit, removing the necessity and expense of a substantial external structure capable of supporting a large detector mass. There are a number of mine pits in northern Minnesota along the NuMI beam that could be used to deploy such a detector. In particular, the Wentworth Pit 2W is at the ideal off-axis angle to contribute to the measurement of the CP violating phase. The detector is designed so that it can be moved to a mine pit in the LBNE beam line once that becomes operational.

MINOS+: a Proposal to FNAL to run MINOS with the medium energy NuMI beam

This is a proposal to continue to expose the two MINOS detectors to the NuMI muon neutrino beam for three years starting in 2013. The medium energy setting of the NuMI beam projected for NO{nu}A will deliver about 18 x 10{sup 20} protons-on-target during the first three years of operation. This will allow the MINOS Far Detector to collect more than 10,000 charged current muon neutrino events in the 4-10 GeV energy range and provide a stringent test for non-standard neutrino interactions, sterile neutrinos, extra dimensions, neutrino time-of-flight, and perhaps more. In addition there will be more than 3,000 neutral current events which will be particularly useful in extending the sterile neutrino search range.

Integration of the Super Nova early warning system with the NOvA Trigger

The NOvA experiment, with a baseline of 810km, samples Fermilab’s upgraded NuMI beam with a Near Detector on-site and a Far Detector (FD) at Ash River, MN, to observe oscillations of muon neutrinos. The 344,064 liquid scintillator-filled cells of the 14 kton FD provide high granularity of a large detector mass and enable us to also study non-accelerator based neutrinos with our Data Driven Trigger framework. This paper will focus on the real time integration of the SNEWS with the NOvA Trigger where we have set up an XML-RPC based messaging system to inject the SNEWS signal directly into our trigger. In conclusion, this presents a departure from the E-Mail based notification mechanism used by SNEWS in the past and allows NOvA more control over propagation and transmission timing.

The NOνA Far Detector Data Acquisition System

The NOνA experiment is a long-baseline neutrino experiment designed to make measurements to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy, neutrino mixing parameters and CP violation in the neutrino sector. In order to make these measurements the NOνA collaboration has designed a highly distributed, synchronized, continuous digitization and readout system that is able to acquire and correlate data from the Fermilab accelerator complex (NuMI), the NOνA near detector at the Fermilab site and the NOνA far detector which is located 810 km away at Ash River, MN. This system has unique properties that let it fully exploit the physics capabilities of the NOνA detector. The design of the NOνA DAQ system and its capabilities are discussed in this paper.

Data acquisition for the Helium and Lead Observatory

The Helium and Lead Observatory (HALO) is a dedicated supernova detector constructed in the underground facilities at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Canada. It is designed to detect neutrinos from a supernova within the Milky Way galaxy using lead blocks and 3He neutron detectors. Analysis of supernova neutrino events can produce new discoveries in astrophysics and fundamental particle physics. HALO will be a participant in the Supernova Early Warning System (SNEWS), which will rely on the time delay between neutrino emission and visible light emission to provide notification to astronomers of an imminent observable supernova. This article discusses the data acquisition system of HALO, including the software ORCA, electronics components, data flow, and the design of the high-voltage and signal connections for the 3He neutron detectors.

SNEWS: A neutrino early warning system for galactic SN II

The detection of neutrinos from SN1987A confirmed the core-collapse nature of SN II, but the neutrinos were not noticed until after the optical discovery. The current generation of neutrino experiments are both much larger and actively looking for SN neutrinos in real time. Since neutrinos escape a new SN promptly while the first photons are not produced until the photospheric shock breakout hours later, these experiments can provide an early warning of a coming galactic SN II. A coincidence network between neutrino experiments has been established to minimize response time, eliminate experimental false alarms, and possibly provide some pointing to the impending event from neutrino wave-front timing.

Detection of the galactic supernova neutrino signal in NOvA experiment

This work describes a data-driven trigger designed to detect neutrino signal from a galactic supernova using the NOvA detectors. NOvA experiment is designed to measure neutrino oscillations in a