Lessons from commissioning of the cryogenic system for the short-baseline neutrino detector at FERMILAB.
Results from commissioning and first year of operations of the cryogenic system of the Short-Baseline Neutrino Detector (SBND) and its membrane cryostat installed at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are described. The SBND detector is installed in a 200 m$^3$ membrane cryostat filled with liquid argon, which serves both as target and as active media. For the correct operation of the detector, the liquid argon must be kept in very stable thermal conditions while the contamination of electronegative impurities must be consistently kept at the level of small fractions of parts per billion. The detector is operated in Booster Neutrino Beams (BNB) at Fermilab for the search of sterile neutrinos and measurements of neutrino-argon cross sections. The cryostat and the cryogenic systems also serve as prototypes for the much larger equipment to be used for the LBNF/DUNE experiment. Since its installation in 2018-2023 and cooldown in spring of 2024, the cryostat and the cryogenic system have been commissioned to support the detector operations. The lessons learned through installation, testing, commissioning, cooldown, and initial operations are described.
Authors
- Trevor Nichols
- M. Geynisman
- C. Montanari (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6322-1386)
- Frederick Schwartz
- R. Acciarri (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-1669-5369)
- Roza Doubnik (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8081-8705)
- Mônica Soares Nunes (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3695-2778)
- J. Bremer (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5439-8953)
- P.J. Wilson
- Caroline Fabre
- William Scofield
- Zach West
Institutions
- Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (US)
- Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Pavia (IT)
Publication Details
- Journal
- ArXiv.org
- Published
- 2025-07-25
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.18462/iir.cryo.2025.0008
- Primary Topic
- Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- U.S. Department of Energy
- China Scholarship Council
- Office of Science
- High Energy Physics