JUNO Status and Physics Potential

Abstract

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a neutrino experiment under construction in an underground laboratory with a 650 m rock overburden near Jiangmen in southern China. The detector’s main component will be 20 kton of liquid scintillator held in a spherical acrylic vessel. The experiment is designed for the determination of neutrino mass ordering, one of the key open questions in neutrino physics. This measurement will be based on observations of the vacuum oscillation pattern of antineutrinos from two nuclear power plants at a baseline of 53 km. The estimated sensitivity is 3σ in about six years with 26.6 GWth of reactor power. A key ingredient for the success is an excellent and extremely challenging energy resolution of 3% at 1 MeV. The light produced by the scintillator will be seen by 17,612 large twenty-inch PMTs and 25,600 small three-inch PMTs. The OSIRIS detector will monitor the radio purity of the liquid scintillator during the months-long filling process of the main detector. The unoscillated antineutrino spectrum from one reactor core will be measured with unprecedented precision by the Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO), located at a baseline of about 30 m. JUNO is expected to substantially improve the precision of sin22θ12, Δm212, and Δm312 neutrino oscillation parameters. Astrophysical measurements of solar, geo-, supernova, DSNB, and atmospheric neutrinos, as well as searching for proton decay and dark matter, are integral parts of the vast JUNO physics program. This contribution reviews the physics goals and current status of the JUNO project.

Authors 1

1. L. Ludhová corresponding Aachen Physics Institute III B

   RWTH Aachen University · Forschungszentrum Jülich

   Affiliation as printed

   Nuclear Physics Institute IKP-2, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Wilhelm-Johnen-Straße, 52428 Jülich, Germany

   Physics Institute III B, RWTH Aachen University, Otto-Blumenthal-Straße, 52074 Aachen, Germany