Physics Potential of an Advanced Scintillation Detector: Introducing THEIA

Abstract

The recent development of water-based liquid scintillator and the concurrent development of high-efficiency and high-precision-timing light sensors has opened up the possibility for a new kind of large-scale detector capable of a very broad program of physics. The program would span topics in nuclear, high-energy, and astrophysics, ranging from a next-generation neutrinoless double beta decay search capable of covering the inverted hierarchy region of phase space, to supernova neutrino detection, nucleon decay searches, and measurement of the neutrino mass hierarchy and CP violating phase. This paper describes the technical breakthroughs that led to this possibility, and the broad physics program thus enabled. This paper is a summary of a talk presented at the NuPhys 2014 conference in London.