The Cryogenic Apparatus for Precision Tests of Argon Interactions with Neutrino (CAP-TAIN) program is designed to make measurements of scientific importance to long-baseline neutrino physics and physics topics that will be explored by large underground detectors. CAPTAIN began as part of a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project and has evolved into a multi-institutional collaboration. The program employs two detectors. The CAPTAIN detector is a liquid argon TPC deployed in a portable and evacuable cryostat that can hold a total of 7700 liters of liquid argon. Five tons of liquid argon are instrumented with a 2,000 channel liquid argon TPC and a photon detection system. The cryostat has ports that can hold optical windows for laser calibration and windows for the introduction of charged particle beams. The materials for the detector are currently being acquired. Assembly is anticipated to begin August of 2013, with a commissioning period ending in the summer of 2014. During commssioning, laser calibration and cosmic-ray data will be taken and analyzed. Subsequent to the commissioning phase, the detector will be moved to a high-energy neutron beamline that is part of the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. The neutron data will be used to measure crosssections of spallation products that are backgrounds to measurements of neutrinos from a supernova burst and cross-sections of events that mimic the electron neutrino appearance signal in long-baseline neutrino physics. The data will also be used to develop strategies for counting neutrons and evaluating their energies in a liquid argon TPC that are important for the total neutrino energy measurement in the analysis of long-baseline neutrinos. The prototype detector is being fabricated in a cryostat supplied by the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) group and consists of a 1,000 channel liquid argon time-projection chamber (TPC). Fabrication also begins in August of 2013, but will be completed more quickly than the CAPTAIN detector. The prototype detector will allow an end-to-end test of all components in time to make adjustments to the scheme employed by CAPTAIN. The prototype will collect cosmic-ray and laser calibration data earlier than will be possible in CAPTAIN allowing the development of analysis techniques at an earlier date. Finally, the prototype will allow for testing of calibration and other ideas in parallel to the running of CAPTAIN.Subsequent to the neutron running, the CAPTAIN detector will be moved to a neutrino source. There are several possible neutrino sources of interest. The two most likely neutrino possibilities are an on-axis run in the NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) beamline at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) and a run in the neutrino source produced by the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. An on-axis run at NUMI produces more than one million events of interest in a two or three year run at neutrino energies between 1 and...
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