Skip to main content
School of Physical and Chemical Sciences

LAGUNA-LBNO

Key questions in physics can be answered only by constructing a giant underground observatory to search for rare events and study terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos. The Astroparticle Roadmap of ApPEC/ASPERA strongly supports this, recommending that: “a new large European infrastructure of 100'000-500'000 ton for proton decay and low-energy neutrinos be evaluated as a common design study together with the underground infrastructure and eventual detection of accelerator neutrino beams”. The latest CERN roadmap also states: “a range of very important non-accelerator experiments takes place at the overlap of particle and astroparticle physics exploring otherwise inaccessible phenomena; Council will seek with ApPEC a coordinated strategy in these areas of mutual interest.” Reacting to this, uniting scientists across Europe with industrial support to produce a very strong collaboration, the LAGUNA FP7 design study has had a very positive effect. It enabled, via study of seven pre-selected locations (Finland, France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain and UK), a detailed geo-technical assessment of the giant underground cavern needed, concluding finally that no geo-technical show-stoppers to cavern construction exist. Building on this, the present design study will address two challenges vital to making a final detector and site choice: (i) to determine the full cost of construction underground, commissioning and long-term operation of
the infrastructure, and (ii) to determine the full impact of including long baseline neutrino physics with beams from CERN.
 
 

This is a project in which  members of the QMUL neutrino group are involved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Activities

QMUL is working on the software and hardware for the next liquid argon detectors (GLACIER). It is leading the corresponding software sub-task in the workpackage 5.

Back to top