What is inside the Super-Kamiokande experiment?

What is inside the Super-Kamiokande experiment?

It consists of a cylindrical stainless steel tank about 40 m (131 ft) in height and diameter holding 50,000 metric tons (55,000 US tons) of ultrapure water. Mounted on an inside superstructure are about 13,000 photomultiplier tubes that detect light from Cherenkov radiation.

Where is the Super-Kamiokande experiment?

Super-Kamiokande is located 1000 m underground in the Kamioka mine, Gifu prefecture, Japan. The horizontal entrance tunnel leads us to the experimental area through 1.7 km drive, which allows us to access the detector for 24 h for maintenance.

Why was Super-Kamiokande built?

The enormous size of the Hyper-Kamiokande (Hyper-K) will enable it to detect unprecedented numbers of neutrinos produced by various sources — including cosmic rays, the Sun, supernovae and beams artificially produced by an existing particle accelerator.

Can you visit Super-Kamiokande?

From the viewpoint of safety management in the mine, individual tours are not permitted as a general rule. However, for educational and research-related organizations, visits may be accepted after coordination.

Who solved the solar neutrino problem?

The solar neutrino problem was solved on June 18, 2001 [1] by a team of collaborative Canadian, American, and British scientists. The results came from an experiment in a detector full of 1,000 tons of heavy water (D2O, or wa- ter composed of deuterium in place of hydrogen.

How do people detect neutrinos?

So how do you detect a neutrino? One common way is to fill a big tank with water. We know light slows down through water, and if a neutrino with enough energy happens to knock into an electron, the electron will zip through the water faster than the light does.

What is a neutrino burst?

Supernova neutrinos are produced when a massive star collapses at the end of its life, ejecting its outer mantle in an explosion. Wilson’s delayed neutrino explosion mechanism has been used for 30 years to explain core collapse supernova.

How does the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory work?

The experiment observed the light produced by relativistic electrons in the water created by neutrino interactions. As relativistic electrons travel through a medium, they lose energy producing a cone of blue light through the Cherenkov effect, and it is this light that is directly detected.

Why do neutrinos oscillate?

Neutrino oscillation arises from mixing between the flavor and mass eigenstates of neutrinos. That is, the three neutrino states that interact with the charged leptons in weak interactions are each a different superposition of the three (propagating) neutrino states of definite mass.

When was Super-Kamiokande built?

The Super-Kamiokande was built so deep into the ground in order to shield the device from cosmic rays and other particles which can adversely affect observation. Construction started in 1991 and the observation facility went into operation in April 1996.

How deep is the Kamioka Observatory?

Buried 1 kilometer underground near the city of Hida in central Japan is an enormous cylinder 40 meters tall and filled with 50 million liters of water.

Where are neutrino detectors located?

The DUNE collaboration will build enormous neutrino detectors. The DUNE near detector, will live 60 meters (200 feet) underground at the experiment’s near site, Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.

Can you visit Kamioka Observatory?

The entrance to KamiokaLab. Admission is free. The unusually named Kamiokande and Super Kamiokande observatories gained international renown first in 2002, when Koshiba Masatoshi won the Nobel Prize for physics for his discoveries there, and then again in 2015, when Kajita Takaaki was similarly honored.

What is a Kamiokande neutrino detector?