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View from inside the filled SNO+ detector. A large transparent acrylic sphere filled with clear liquid, immersed in water. Surrounding the water, thousands of light-detecting photomultiplier tubes can be seen glinting with the reflective concentrators that surround them.

SNO+ detector. The inner vessel is filled with 780T of liquid scintillator and surrounded by a geodesic sphere of photomultiplier tubes immersed in ultra-pure water. The detector is located 2.1km underground at Canada's SNOLAB, outside of Sudbury, Western Ontario.

Credit: SNOLAB

Daniel Cookman

Graduate student

Research theme

  • Particle astrophysics & cosmology
  • Fundamental particles and interactions

Sub department

  • Particle Physics

Research groups

  • SNO+
daniel.cookman@physics.ox.ac.uk
Denys Wilkinson Building
  • About
  • Publications

I'm working on the SNO+ experiment, a neutrino detector found 2km underground in Sudbury, Canada. Its flagship goal is to search for so-called "neutrinoless double-beta decay", which if found would be the rarest form of radioactive decay in the Universe, and crucially would help us to understand why neutrinos have mass.

My work on the experiment falls (roughly!) into two categories. My main analysis work is using neutrinos that we detect coming from the Sun to measure parameters defining their "oscillation": it was this phenomenon of neutrino oscillations that our predecessor experiment SNO helped to discover.

Alongside this, I help to calibrate the optics of the detector with the SMELLIE sub-system (The Scattering Module for the Embedded LED/Laser Light Injection Entity). As the name suggests, this is a series of lasers which can fire at different visible wavelengths via optical fibres into the detector. In so doing, we can measure the optical scattering properties of the 780 tonnes of liquid scintillator present in our detector. Understanding and measuring the optical properties of our detector is critical to enable the world-leading research we are trying to perform.

Research interests

Neutrino Physics

Selected publications

The SNO+ Experiment

ArXiv 2104.11687 (2021)
SNO Collaboration, V Albanese, R Alves, MR Anderson, S Andringa, L Anselmo, E Arushanova, S Asahi, M Askins, DJ Auty, AR Back, S Back, F Barão, Z Barnard, A Barr, N Barros, D Bartlett, R Bayes, C Beaudoin, EW Beier, G Berardi, A Bialek, SD Biller, E Blucher, R Bonventre, M Boulay, D Braid, E Caden, EJ Callaghan, J Caravaca, J Carvalho, L Cavalli, D Chauhan, M Chen, O Chkvorets, KJ Clark, B Cleveland, C Connors, D Cookman, IT Coulter, MA Cox, D Cressy, X Dai, C Darrach, B Davis-Purcell, C Deluce, MM Depatie, F Descamps, F Di Lodovico, J Dittmer, A Doxtator, N Duhaime, F Duncan, J Dunger, AD Earle, D Fabris, E Falk, A Farrugia, N Fatemighomi, C Felber, V Fischer, E Fletcher, R Ford, K Frankiewicz, N Gagnon, A Gaur, J Gauthier, A Gibson-Foster, K Gilje, OI González-Reina, D Gooding, P Gorel, K Graham, C Grant, J Grove, S Grullon, E Guillian, S Hall, AL Hallin, D Hallman, S Hans, J Hartnell, P Harvey, M Hedayatipour, WJ Heintzelman, J Heise, RL Helmer, B Hodak, M Hodak, M Hood, D Horne, B Hreljac, J Hu, SMA Hussain, T Iida, AS Inácio, CM Jackson, NA Jelley, CJ Jillings, C Jones, PG Jones, K Kamdin, T Kaptanoglu, J Kaspar, K Keeter, C Kefelian, P Khaghani, L Kippenbrock, JR Klein, R Knapik, J Kofron, LL Kormos, S Korte, B Krar, C Kraus, CB Krauss, T Kroupová, K Labe, F Lafleur, I Lam, C Lan, BJ Land, R Lane, S Langrock, P Larochelle, S Larose, A LaTorre, I Lawson, L Lebanowski, GM Lefeuvre, EJ Leming, A Li, O Li, J Lidgard, B Liggins, P Liimatainen, YH Lin, X Liu, Y Liu, V Lozza, M Luo, S Maguire, A Maio, K Majumdar, S Manecki, J Maneira, RD Martin, E Marzec, A Mastbaum, A Mathewson, N McCauley, AB McDonald, K McFarlane, P Mekarski, M Meyer, C Miller, C Mills, M Mlejnek, E Mony, B Morissette, I Morton-Blake, MJ Mottram, S Nae, M Nirkko, LJ Nolan, VM Novikov, HM O'Keeffe, E O'Sullivan, GD Orebi Gann, MJ Parnell, J Paton, SJM Peeters, T Pershing, Z Petriw, J Petzoldt, L Pickard, D Pracsovics, G Prior, JC Prouty, S Quirk, S Read, A Reichold, S Riccetto, R Richardson, M Rigan, I Ritchie, A Robertson, BC Robertson, J Rose, R Rosero, PM Rost, J Rumleskie, MA Schumaker, MH Schwendener, D Scislowski, J Secrest, M Seddighin, L Segui, S Seibert, I Semenec, F Shaker, T Shantz, MK Sharma, TM Shokair, L Sibley, JR Sinclair, K Singh, P Skensved, M Smiley, T Sonley, A Sörensen, M St-Amant, R Stainforth, S Stankiewicz, M Strait, MI Stringer, A Stripay, R Svoboda, S Tacchino, B Tam, C Tanguay, J Tatar, L Tian, N Tolich, J Tseng, HWC Tseung, E Turner, R Van Berg, E Vázquez-Jáuregui, JGC Veinot, CJ Virtue, B von Krosigk, JMG Walker, M Walker, J Wallig, SC Walton, J Wang, M Ward, O Wasalski, J Waterfield, JJ Weigand, RF White, JR Wilson, TJ Winchester, P Woosaree, A Wright, JP Yanez, M Yeh, T Zhang, Y Zhang, T Zhao, K Zuber, A Zummo
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