Institut de recherche sur les lois fondamentales de l'Univers

I will discuss the physics motivation and current status of two major new efforts in neutrino physics: (1) Our current main emphasis is on the Daya Bay experiment, which has the goal of detecting oscillations of antineutrinos emitted by the Daya Bay nuclear reactors in China, in order to make a high-precision measurement of the unknown mixing angle, θ13. (2) We are also participating in SNO+, which plans to use the existing SNO experimental setup, including the 12-meter acrylic vessel, the ~104 PMT’s, and the DAQ, to search for neutrinoless double beta-decay in 150Nd. A common link between these two experiments is our development of new metal-loaded liquid scintillators (M-LS) as the neutrino detectors, Gd-LS for Daya Bay and Nd-LS for SNO+. We are also working on the detection and removal of low-levels of radioactive contaminants, such as U, Th, Ra, in the M-LS and other components of the detector.