Development of a Low-Energy Neutrino Spectrometer to Measure the Neutrino Luminosity of the Sun

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The basic objective of this proposal is to construct and operate MINILENS, a prototype designed to examine the fundamental practical feasibility of the LENS pp neutrino detector. This consists of demonstrating the ability of the LENS design:. To discriminate the large background basically due to the presence of the beta activity of the target In-115. To demonstrate the technical construction and operation of the newly invented scintillation lattice chamber that promises superior position resolution that does not suffer from the problems of using time-of-flight methods at the low energies characteristic of the LENS detector. To demonstrate the ability to produce large (at least 100's of liters of In-loaded liquid scintillator with extremely stringent demands on performance. . To show that MINILENS as constructed and operated in an underground location is robust, stable, safe and capable of delivering the required overall background suppression (both internal and external) and even show the ability to detect terrestrial signals that simulate pp neutrinos and thus measure the detection efficiency of the analysis protocols. The final results would demonstrate our control of both background and signal.In short, the construction and operation of MINILENS will unambiguously demonstrate the feasibility of LENS in all its technical aspects at a miniscule cost of the full scale detector.