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Frédéric Yermia

Publications and source records attributed to Frédéric Yermia.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

After 60 years, here comes the Sun

For sixty years, the Sun served neutrino physics more than the reverse: its neutrinos established oscillations rather than probing the star itself. That is now changing. Reactor antineutrinos have pinned down the oscillation parameters governing solar-neutrino flavour conversion so precisely that the propagation-related uncertainty is becoming negligible -- closing the first of two abysses. Solar neutrinos can, at last, be turned on the Sun. Yet a second abyss remains: today's solar-neutrino detection falls an order of magnitude short of the precision the Standard Solar Model already predicts for the dominant pp flux ($>\,$90$\%$) -- a gap no reactor experiment can close. The intrinsic $^{14}\mathrm{C}$ background walls off the pp region; only new detection techniques can breach it. Bridging this second abyss demands a revolution, not an increment. Combined with helioseismology's complementary reading of the Sun's mechanical structure, precision neutrino measurements of the nuclear source terms would enable a multi-messenger heliotomography of the solar interior -- reading our star from both sides at once. A new age of solar discoveries may follow, on one condition: that the field builds the instruments equal to the task.

hep-ex↗

The High Voltage Splitter board for the JUNO SPMT system

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) in southern China is designed to study neutrinos from nuclear reactors and natural sources to address fundamental questions in neutrino physics. Achieving its goals requires continuous operation over a 20-year period. The small photomultiplier tube (small PMT or SPMT) system is a subsystem within the experiment composed of 25600 3-inch PMTs and their associated readout electronics. The High Voltage Splitter (HVS) is the first board on the readout chain of the SPMT system and services the PMTs by providing high voltage for biasing and by decoupling the generated physics signal from the high-voltage bias for readout, which is then fed to the front-end board. The necessity to handle high voltage, manage a large channel count, and operate stably for 20 years imposes significant constraints on the physical design of the HVS. This paper serves as a comprehensive documentation of the HVS board: its role in the SPMT readout system, the challenges in its design, performance and reliability metrics, and the methods employed for production and quality control.

physics.ins-det↗

Multi-Calorimetry in Light-based Neutrino Detectors

Neutrino detectors are among the largest photon detection instruments, built to capture scarce photons upon energy deposition. Many discoveries in neutrino physics, including the neutrino itself, are inseparable from the advances in photon detection technology, particularly in photo-sensors and readout electronics, to yield ever higher precision and richer detection information. The measurement of the energy of neutrinos, referred to as calorimetry, can be achieved in two distinct approaches: photon-counting, where single-photon can be counted digitally, and photon-integration, where multi-photons are aggregated and estimated via analogue signals. The energy is pursued today to reach permille level systematics control precision in ever-vast volumes, exemplified by experiments like JUNO. The unprecedented precision brings to the foreground the systematics due to calorimetric response entanglements in energy, position and time that were negligible in the past, thus driving further innovation in calorimetry. This publication describes a novel articulation that detectors can be endowed with multiple photon detection systems. This multi-calorimetry approach opens the notion of dual-calorimetry detector, consisting of both photon-counting and photon-integration systems, as a cost-effective evolution from the single calorimetry setups used over several decades for most experiments so far. The dual-calorimetry design exploits unique response synergies between photon-counting and photon-integration systems, including correlations and cancellations in calorimetric responses, to maximise the mitigation of response entanglements, thereby yielding permille-level high-precision calorimetry.

hep-ex↗

Mass production and characterization of 3-inch PMTs for the JUNO experiment

26,000 3-inch photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) have been produced for Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) by the Hainan Zhanchuang Photonics Technology Co., Ltd (HZC) company in China and passed all acceptance tests with only 15 tubes rejected. The mass production began in 2018 and elapsed for about 2 years at a rate of $\sim$1,000~PMTs per month. The characterization of the PMTs was performed in the factory concurrently with production as a joint effort between HZC and JUNO. Fifteen performance parameters were tracked at different sampling rates, and novel working strategies were implemented to improve quality assurance. This constitutes the largest sample of 3-inch PMTs ever produced and studied in detail to date.

physics.ins-det↗