Experimental HEP Seminar

A TPC for the T2K ND280 Experiment

Marie Di Marco

DPNC
Université de Genève

T2K is a long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment aiming at the discovery of the ν_μ → ν_e appearance with a factor 20 of improvement in sensitivity over past experiments. A high intensity proton beam from the JPARC 50 GeV synchrotron produces a pion decay neutrino beam aimed with a 2.5 degree off-axis angle to the Super-Kamiokande detector. The flux, spectrum and cross sections of the neutrinos (~750 MeV/c) have to be measured before they have a chance to oscillate. This is achieved by the near detector, located 280m away from the source. ND280 uses the UA1 magnet operated with a magnetic field of 0.2T, in which sits a tracker composed of 3 time projection chambers (TPC's) interlayed with 2 fine grained detectors. The 1x2.5x2.5 m TPCs measure the 3-momenta of charged particles, and are readout by 72 MicroMegas (micropattern gas detectors). This talk will present the T2K experiment, the ND280 detector and more specifically the TPC and the characterization and energy calibration of its readout modules.