The SuperNEMO calorimeter

Christine Marquet (1)

1 CENBG - Centre d'Etudes Nucléaires de Bordeaux Gradignan

The SuperNEMO double beta decay project is a modular tracker-calorimeter experiment that will reach a sensitivity to the neutrinoless double beta decay half-life of ∼ 10(26) years, corresponding to a Majorana neutrino mass of 50-100 meV. The main calorimeter is based on 440 Optical Modules made of large volume plastic scintillators (10L) coupled with large area photomultipliers (Hamamatsu R5912-Mod). They are assembled in walls surrounding the isotope foil and the tracking volume. One of the main challenges of the SuperNEMO detector development programme was to reach an energy resolution, better than 8%(FWHM) at 1 MeV. The other challenge was to satisfy the radiopurity requirements for all the calorimeter materials. The calorimeter design of the first SuperNEMO module is presented as well as its performances and the status of its construction under way in the Modane underground laboratory.

Mots clés: activity report; calorimeter: design; Neutrino Ettore Majorana Observatory; scintillation counter: plastics; energy resolution; photomultiplier; sensitivity; performance

Domaines: Instrumentations et Détecteurs [physics.ins-det]

Christine Marquet. The SuperNEMO calorimeter. 27th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, Jul 2016, London, United Kingdom. pp.012227, ⟨10.1088/1742-6596/888/1/012227⟩. ⟨hal-01645263⟩