First Neutrinos in SciBooNE

I am the co-spokesperson of SciBooNE, Fermilab's newest neutrino experiment. We have a small detector with fine-grained tracking capability (for a neutrino experiment) placed 100m from the beam target of the Booster Neutrtino Beam, which is the same beam that sends neutrinos to MiniBooNE. We've just crossed the latest and most exciting of a series of significant milestones: recording our first neutrino events! Early last week, our Run Coordinator Masashi Yokoyama from Kyoto University, led the SciBooNE graduate students on an all-nighter so we could record a neutrino event or two in time for the NuInt07 conference at Fermilab. The results were fantastic, and one example is shown at right.

The picture is a top-view event display of our first neutrino interaction with energy deposited in all three detector subsystems. The green field at left represents the SciBar detector, which is made of plastic scintillators with wavelength shifting fibers read out by multi-anode PMTS. The traced square and rectangles in the middle represent the Electron Catcher (EC), which is a lead/scintillating fibre EM calorimeter. The beige strips with small green trim at right represent the Muon Range Detector, which is made of 5 cm iron planes interspersed with plastic scintillators paddles read out by 2-inch PMTs. Maybe Joe will write a blog entry to describe what the MRD does; he knows all about it since he built it! Anyway, the event appears to be a single mu+ track from a muon-antineutrino. In the display, the red dots in SciBar represent strips that registered PMT hits, and the size of the dot is proportional to the amount of charge recorded. The horizontal blue and red lines next to the EC show the amount of charge read out by the EC PMTs (the EC modules are read out on both sides) and are consistent with a MIP. The MRD squares represent scintillators that were hit; we can see that the muon penetrated at least 7 of the iron planes.

Although we have identical readout systems for the side view, we were not running those channels when this event was recorded because the cooling systems were not yet fully operational. They are operational now, and we should be ready for stable beam operations by early next week.

It's a very exciting time for SciBooNE!