The JUNO detector: design concept and status

The JUNO central detector will contain a 35.4 m diameter acrylic vessel filled with 20-kt of linear alkyl benzene based scintillator, and submerged in a water pool equipped with photomultipliers to act as Cherenkov detector. The scintillation light will be read-out by 17612 20” photomultipliers and 25600 3” photomultipliers, reaching a geometric coverage of about 78%. On top of the main detector, a plastic scintillator tracker will complete the JUNO veto system for cosmic muons. JUNO's ambitious design primarily aims to the determination of the neutrino mass ordering at high statistical significance (3-4 σ in about 6 years of data taking), by measuring the oscillation pattern of electron antineutrinos generated by two nuclear power plants, on a ∼ 53 km baseline from the experimental site. JUNO will target an unprecedented 3% energy resolution at 1 MeV scale, thus it will be a unique facility for particle and astroparticle physics. Besides its main goal, JUNO indeed aspires to the sub-percent determination of the neutrino oscillation parameters (sin2 θ12, ∆m221, and ∆m231) as well as to the measurement of atmospheric neutrinos, to solar neutrino precision spectroscopy, and to the detection of low-energy neutrinos coming from supernovae and geo-neutrinos. In this contribution, the JUNO detector design and the status of the experiment construction are presented.