Status and New Ideas Regarding Liquid Argon Detectors

Understand

Large (up to $\sim 100$ kt) liquid argon time-projection chamber detectors are presently being considered for proton decay searches and neutrino astrophysics, as well as for far detectors for the next generation of long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments that aim to determine neutrino mass hierarchy and search for CP violation in the leptonic sector.

• These detectors rely on the capabilities to assemble large volumes of LAr in ultrahigh-purity conditions, possibly in an underground environment, and to achieve relatively long drifts for the ionization charge.
• Several proposals have been developed, each of which takes a different approach to the design of the cryogenic vessels and has different scales of modularity to reach the final mass dictated by physics.
• New detector concepts, with innovative designs of readout electronics and novel methods for the readout of the ionization charge and scintillation light, have been proposed.