A. Menegolli

ICARUS and status of liquid argon technology

ICARUS T600 is the largest liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LAr TPC) detector ever realized. It operates underground at the LNGS laboratory in Gran Sasso. It has been smoothly running since summer 2010, collecting data with the CNGS (Cern to Gran Sasso) beam and with cosmic particles. Liquid Argon TPCs are indeed electronic bubble chambers, providing a completely uniform imaging calorimetry with unprecedented accuracy on such massive volumes. ICARUS T600 is internationally considered as a milestone towards the realization of the next generation of massive detectors (tens of ktons) for neutrino and rare event physics. Results will be presented on the data collected so far with the detector.

WARP: A WIMP DOUBLE PHASE ARGON DETECTOR

The WARP programme for dark matter search with a double phase argon detector is presented. In such a detector both excitation and ionization produced by an impinging particle are evaluated by the contemporary measurement of primary scintillation and secondary (proportional) light signal, this latter being produced by extracting and accelerating ionization electrons in the gas phase. The proposed technique, verified on a 2.3 liters prototype, could be used to efficiently discriminate nuclear recoils, induced by WIMPs interactions, and measure their energy spectrum. An overview of the 2.3 liters results and of the proposed 100 liters detector is shown.

Systematic study of innovative hygroscopic and non-hygroscopic crystals with SiPM array readout

Different crystals with SiPM array readout were tested in laboratory. Hygroscopic crystals, such as LaBr 3 :Ce and CeBr 3 , and innovative non-hygroscopic crystals, such as PrLuAg and CeCAAG were studied. 4 × 4 SiPM arrays from different manufacturers were used as photodetectors. Best results were obtained with LaBr 3 :Ce crystals read by Hamamatsu S13361 TSV arrays. For LaBr 3 :Ce crystals, due to their high photon yield, it was possible to implement a simple readout scheme based on CAEN V1730 FADC, without any amplification. Energy resolutions (FWHM) better than 4% were obtained at the Cs 137 peak, with a detector linearity better than 2%.