LNS Lunchtime Seminar

, 414

Darcy NewmarkThe Coherent CAPTAIN-Mills ExperimentAbstract: The Coherent CAPTAIN-Mills (CCM) experiment is an operating 10-ton liquid argon light collection detector located at Los Alamos National Lab studying neutrino and beyond Standard Model physics. The Los Alamos Neutron Science Center is equipped with an 800 MeV proton beam that impinges on a tungsten target, producing a large flux of neutrons, pions, electrons, and photons. The detector is located 23m downstream from the beam stop and 90 degrees off-axis, making it optimally sensitive to pion decays at rest. CCM will measure 2.25 x 1022 POT in the ongoing 3 year run cycle, producing a neutrino flux of 5.28 x 105 neutrinos/cm2/s at the detector. The prototype detector was constructed and took engineering run data in 2019, which produced physics results searching for ALPs and MeV scale QCD axion couplings to EM charge carries and light dark matter interactions. The detector instrumentation was upgraded in 2021 and the current physics goals are improving searches for axions, light dark matter, testing BSM solutions to the MiniBooNE anomaly, search for heavy neutral leptons, and various neutrino SM cross section measurements. In addition to instrumentation upgrades, the CCM collaboration is currently improving the signal reconstruction strategy to improve background rejection capabilities. This talk will focus on the analysis to identify Cherenkov light on an event-by-event basis, allowing particle identification – enabling improved sensitives to dark sector and BSM physics searches.