The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a long baseline neutrino experiment which aims to:

• Discover CP Violation in the leptonic sector 
• Determine the neutrino Mass Ordering 
• Precisely measure neutrino oscillation parameters
• Test the 3-flavour paradigm

This ambitious program also includes the search for Nucleon Decay and the astrophysical observations of Galactic Supernovae.  

Neutrinos produced by a high power wide-band neutrino beam produced at Fermilab, will be detected at a baseline of 1300 km, by 4 giant liquid argon (LAr) detector modules deep underground (SURF laboratory, South Dakota), each module containing 17ktons of LAr.

One of these modules will be a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) with a Vertical Drift. A Photo-Detection System (PDS) is installed alongside the TPC to provide timing information on the events.  The DUNE team at APC is highly invested in the design and production of the PDS system, and the work of this thesis will be framed within this effort. 

A large-scale prototype, ProtoDUNE-VD, with almost a kilo-ton of LAr has been installed at the CERN Neutrino Platform and will be taking data throughout 2025-2026. The selected candidate will participate in the data taking and data analysis efforts, in particular contributing to the evaluation of the performance of the PDS detectors through dedicated analysis. 

ProtoDUNE-VD will take data with a charged particle beam allowing the study of how protons, pions, kaons, muons, of known energies, are measured in this new detector.  The selected candidate will become familiar with the collaboration's standardized analysis tools with the goal of developing and studying this data using both TPC and PDS data. These performance measurements will lead to a more realistic evaluation of the expected performance of the Vertical Drift Far Detector module to neutrino interactions.  The candidate would then be well placed to contribute to the evaluation of systematic uncertainties related to the detector performance, which allows to assess the experiment's sensitivity to its physics goals.

The group is also participating in both the construction of the detector in South Dakota and the R&D towards the future far detector modules. Therefore a part of the thesis work is foreseen to be hardware-related, contributing to the laboratory measurements and to the prototyping installations at CERN.