Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Project

SNO+ is the follow-up experiment to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO). In SNO+, the detector is filled with a liquid scintillator instead of the heavy water that was in SNO. A liquid scintillator emits copious amounts of light when a neutrino interacts in it. This enables SNO+ to detect events with lower energies, extending its capabilities and enabling SNO+ to address new, fundamental questions in particle physics, geosciences, and astrophysics. SNO+ will start where SNO left off and will expand our understanding of the neutrino and its impact on the evolution of the Universe. By detecting lower energy neutrinos from the Sun, SNO+ will study the properties of neutrinos and the energy generation processes in stars. Its very deep underground location helps to reduce backgrounds produced by cosmic rays, thus giving SNO+ the potential to make measurements that improve upon results from previous experiments. SNO+ can distinguish between interactions by solar neutrinos and geo neutrinos, which are the neutrinos produced by natural radioactivity in the Earth. The flux of geo neutrinos that SNO+ will measure is correlatedwith the total amount of radioactivity in the deep Earth and the role it plays in Earth's energetic processes and formation history. Antineutrinos from nearby nuclear power reactors will also be detected and used to measure parameters that govern the behaviour of neutrino oscillations. SNO+ can make the most precise measurement of an oscillation parameter that is the difference between two of the neutrino masses. SNO+ has already searched for a potential rare decay mode of protons and neutrons, setting the best limits. In other exotic astroparticle searches, SNO+ will have excellent sensitivity. If a core-collapse supernova were to occur in the galaxy, SNO+ would detect the burst of neutrinos released, yielding a wealth of information. SNO+ can also search for various dark matter candidate particles, exploring possibilities that previous experiments didn't have the sensitivity for. Finally, an extremely rare nuclear decay will also be studied in SNO+ by dissolving tellurium in the liquid scintillator. Observation of this process, known as neutrinoless double beta decay, would reveal insights into the matter-antimatter properties of the neutrino, and its connection to the Universe's matter-antimatter balance. Fundamental symmetries and physics at higher energy scales would be probed. Neutrinoless double beta decay is therefore one of the most important pursuits in physics today. The wide variety of science topics that will be explored provides excellent opportunities for HQP training. SNO+ experimental activities, such as calibrations, mitigation of radon backgrounds and operations of process systems that will produce highly purified tellurium compounds also provide HQP with valuable hardware skills that are transferrable. HQP develop computing and data analysis skills in performing physics analyses with SNO+ data.