Beyond the opaque scintillators, the construction and the detection optimisation of LiquidO implies a major effort in engineering beyond today’s state-of-the-art knowledge and/or technology in terms of mechanical structure(s), radiopurity, instrumentation, electronics, DAQ, temperature control as well as novel active veto detection strategies.
The LiquidO consortium has been involved, since 2016, in finding reliable existing solutions and, whenever needed, developing novel engineering solutions addressing:
- conceptual design of novel optical fibre technology,
- optical coupling between the fibres and the readout, including a possible specialised light collector system,
- few meter detector full engineered scaling solutions,
- sub-100ps fast front-end readout,
- pulse optimisation for sub-ns waveform digitisation and reconstruction,
- readout and trigger schemes, including high trigger rate and large data-volume capabilities,
- precise large volume temperature control and monitoring,
- novel active veto-detector technology,
- radiopurity compliant design of all detector elements, and
- customised optimal data analysis techniques, including full event topology reconstruction.
Some of those developments are still ongoing and solutions will be adopted and implemented in the different prototypes – mainly the MINI(γ)-Prototype – and other LiquidO-based project detectors. The outcome of that development will follow dedicated technical publication(s) in due time. For now, all those developments follow a strict level of confidentiality to till innovation constraints are met.