The use of liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs) for neutrino experiments provides good tracking resolution of interactions and PID capabilities. DUNE is a next generation long-baseline neutrino experiment that will employ LArTPCs to measure neutrino oscillation properties with great precision, exploring the neutrino mass hierarchy and charge-parity violation in the leptonic sector. DUNE will also allow the investigation of non-beam neutrinos such as those coming from astrophysical sources and beyond standard model physics. The experiment will have the most intense neutrino beam to date (> 2 MW) generated by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), in Illinois, USA, where its near detector will be located, and travel 1300 km underground to the far detector site, in South Dakota, where neutrino interactions within large volumes of liquid argon will be recorded, 1.5 km below the surface.
Charged particles will deposit energy along their paths in liquid argon, which can excite or ionize the medium. Ionization electrons are collected by applying intense electric fields that drift the negative charge towards the anodes providing 2D images used to reconstruct the interaction. Argon is also a prolific scintillator and the detection of the light signal is done with the experiment’s photon detection system. We discuss how to better model the combined ionization charge and scintillation light emission in argon using a phenomenological model called LArQL and how the use of both signals together has the potential to improve GeV neutrino interaction reconstruction in LArTPCs and impact DUNE's physics program.
Supported by the European Union – NextGenerationEU and by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 under Grant No. CNS2023-144183.
