The Long Journey of ICARUS: From the LAr-TPC Concept to the First Full-Scale Detector

Abstract

The Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LAr-TPC) technology was conceived at the end of the 1970s as a way to combine the excellent spatial and calorimetric performance of the traditional bubble chambers with the electronic read-out of the TPCs, obtaining the so-called “electronic bubble chambers”. This technology was intended to be applied in particular to neutrino physics as an alternative to Ring Water Cherenkov detectors. The main technological issues of such an innovative technique were investigated from the very beginning within the ICARUS program, with staged R&D starting from prototypes of increasing mass to arrive, at the end of 1990s, at the largest LAr-TPC detector ever built at that time: ICARUS-T600, with almost 500 tons of active LAr. The successful operations of the ICARUS-T600 LAr-TPC in its more than twenty years of life, from the first run at surface in Pavia (Italy) in 2001 to the LNGS (Italy) underground run being exposed to the CNGS beam from CERN to Gran Sasso (2010–2013) and finally to the ongoing run at Fermilab (USA) for sterile neutrino searches (2020–), have demonstrated the huge potential of the LAr-TPC technique, paving the way to future larger LAr-TPCs detectors as DUNE.

Keywords

• liquid argon detectors
• time projection chambers
• neutrino physics