Yale Physics’s associate research scientist Domenico Franco and graduate students Giacomo Scanavini and Angela White from Bonnie Fleming’s Yale High-Energy Neutrino Physics group successfully mounted the Bottom Field Cage of the Short Baseline Near Detector (SBND) Time Projection Chamber (TPC) at Fermilab in August of 2021.
This is a milestone for the SBND experiment, which now enters into the “assembling era”. The Bottom Field Cage installation was a crucial step that will now allow the rest of the detector to be assembled.
In the next phase, the 4 Anode Plane Assemblies (APAs)–two of which were built at Yale’s Wright Lab in 2018–will be installed and connected to the Bottom Field Cage. APAs are the wire planes that collect the charge produced in the detector.
Following the APA installation, in Fall of 2021, the Yale team will install the Top and Side Field Cage, which will complete the detector construction.
In 2022, the TPC will be then gently lowered in its final position; the cryostat at the SBN-ND building at FNAL, where eventually the commissioning and data taking will start.
This article has been adapted from a description by Domenico Franco.