Study on the Performance of Neutrino Detection in JUNO (Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory)

Neutrino Physics has seen very important discoveries in recent decades which have made it one of the most promising fields for the discovery of new Physics beyond the Standard Model of the elementary particles. The discovery of the flavour oscillation of neutrinos had the direct con- sequence that the neutrino has a very small mass, if compared to other leptons, in contrast as was hypothesized when it was introduced. There are three lepton families of neutrinos: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos. In addition to these three flavour eigenstates, there are three mass eigenstates. The value of the mass of these three eigenstates, however, is not known since experimentally it is possible to measure only the squared difference of the masses of the different eigenstates. Thanks to quantum resonance effects during propagation in matter, it was discov- ered that m1 < m2 but we know nothing about m3. This led to the creation of two different orderings for the mass of the three eigenstates: in Nor- mal Mass Ordering (NMO) m3 takes on the higher mass value while in the case of Inverted Mass Ordering (IMO), it takes on the lower value. In order to find out which order is the correct one, the JUNO (Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory) Neutrino Observatory is being built in China. JUNO can detect neutrinos coming from different sources and this Ph.D. thesis focuses on studying the detection of neutrinos emitted by QCD-driven SuperNova (SN). This is a non-standard mechanism and the detection of neutrinos coming from this kind of SN with JUNO is studied for the first time. The promising results are shown in the first part of this Ph.D. thesis. The second part presents a review of the Sil- icon Photo-Multiplier (SiPM) technologies and its use in TAO (Taishan Antineutrino Observatory), a second detector of the JUNO Observatory to be placed 30 m away from the core of a nuclear power plant in China. The SiPMs to be used have to fulfil a list of requirements and, for this reason, they have to be tested before the deployment in the final detector. The set-up designed for the test and the procedure to be performed will be described in the last chapter of the Thesis.