We are really glad to announce that Francesc Monrabal, our NEXT colleague, has just been awarded the prestigious Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC).
For those who don’t know, the ERC -the premier European funding organization for vanguard research- awards the most promising early-career researchers with ERC Starting Grants so as to develop and launch their own projects. This grant is absolutely esteemed, seeing that only less than 10% of the candidates end up obtaining the €1.5 million help.
The honouree Francesc Monrabal, long-time NEXT collaborator and already an expert on gaseous TPCs, will be able to set up and develop the GanESS project, which stands for Gaseous detector for Neutrino physics at the ESS. It is meant to exploit coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scatterings to detect neutrinos and explore physics beyond Standard Model. The main advantage of this technique, in comparison with the rest of usual neutrino-detection experiments, is that very large detectors with tons of active materials are not required.
The final stage of the experiment is planned to be constructed in Lund (Sweden) so as to use the upcoming European Spallation Source (ESS), which will be located at the same place. The detector concept will correspond to a Time Projection Chamber (TPC) filled with 20 kg of xenon gas, analogous to the NEXT’s technology, that will allow detecting more than 7,000 events per year. The operation of this detector is expected to start in 2026. Until then, construction and operation of smaller prototypes will comprise the first stage within the experiment program, with the aim of testing and studying the detector technology.