Prospects for CHIPS (R&D of Water Cherenkov Detectors in Mine Pits)

CHIPS is an R&D program focused on designing and constructing a cost-effective large water Cherenkov detector (WCD) to study neutrino oscillations using accelerator beams. Traditional WCD's with a low energy threshold have been built in special large underground caverns. Civil construction of such facilities is costly and the excavation phase significantly delays the detector installation although, in the end, it offers a well-shielded apparatus with versatile physics program. Using concepts developed for the LBNE WCD (arXiv:1204.2295), we propose to submerge a detector in a deep water reservoir, which avoids the excavation and exploits the directionality of an accelerator neutrino beam for optimizing the detector. Following the LOI (arXiv:1307.5918), we have submerged a small test detector in a mine pit in Minnesota, 7 mrad off the NuMI axis. By adopting some technical ideas and solutions from IceCube and KM3NeT experiments, we are now focusing on designing a large (10 - 20 kt) isolated water container to house photodetectors with underwater readout and triggering. Here, we describe in more detail the CHIPS concept, its physics motivation and potential, and we briefly present the ongoing R&D activities