The broadband neutrino beam being built for the long baseline neutrino facility (LBNF) and DUNE offer an opportunity for world-leading long-baseline neutrino oscillation measurements. We consider two scenarios, one in which Theia would reside in a cavern the size and shape of those intended to be excavated for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), which we call Theia-25, and a larger 100-ktonne version ( Theia-100) that could achieve an even broader and more sensitive scientific program. We discuss in this white paper a new kind of detector, called Theia (after the Titan Goddess of light), whose aim is to make world-leading measurements over as broad range of neutrino physics and astrophysics as possible. That scientific breadth has been mirrored by the broad array of technologies used to detect and study neutrinos, with the strength of each technology typically focused on a narrow slice of neutrino physics. Yet neutrinos access a breadth of science no other fundamental particle can: understanding the weak sector through direct measurements of neutrino properties testing fundamental symmetries of Nature probing near and distant astrophysical phenomena peering into the interior of the Earth, and understanding the earliest moments of the Universe. Neutrinos are the fundamental particles we would most expect to be ignored: they interact too weakly and are too light to directly affect most microscopic processes. This paper describes Theia, a detector design that incorporates these new technologies in a practical and affordable way to accomplish the science goals described above. The scientific program would include observations of low- and high-energy solar neutrinos, determination of neutrino mass ordering and measurement of the neutrino CP-violating phase \(\delta \), observations of diffuse supernova neutrinos and neutrinos from a supernova burst, sensitive searches for nucleon decay and, ultimately, a search for neutrinoless double beta decay, with sensitivity reaching the normal ordering regime of neutrino mass phase space. Situated deep underground, and utilizing new techniques in computing and reconstruction, this detector could achieve unprecedented levels of background rejection, enabling a rich physics program spanning topics in nuclear, high-energy, and astrophysics, and across a dynamic range from hundreds of keV to many GeV. Such a detector could reconstruct particle direction and species using Cherenkov light while also having the excellent energy resolution and low threshold of a scintillator detector. New developments in liquid scintillators, high-efficiency, fast photon detectors, and chromatic photon sorting have opened up the possibility for building a large-scale detector that can discriminate between Cherenkov and scintillation signals. The European Physical Journal C volume 80, Article number: 416 ( 2020) Theia: an advanced optical neutrino detector
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