- Soudan 2
Soudan 2 was a particle detector located in the
Soudan Mine in Northern Minnesota, United States. It was a 960 ton iron trackingcalorimeter whose primary purpose was to search forproton decay, although its data was also used to investigate the properties ofneutrinos . It found no evidence of proton decay, but it did help confirmSuper-Kamiokande 's atmospheric neutrino result, supporting the theory ofneutrino oscillation . ["Current Aspects of Neutrino Physics", Caldwell, David O. (Ed.), 2001, ISBN 3-540-41002-3]The Soudan Mine is also home to the
MINOS andCDMS detectors.History
Soudan 2 was the successor to the
Soudan 1 , a similar 30 ton detector also intended to search for proton decay. [http://ccdb4fs.kek.jp/cgi-bin/img_index?8203219 "The Soudan Nucleon Decay Program", D.S. Ayres. ANL-HEP-CP-82-03, Presented at Workshop on Physics and Astrophysics with a Multikiloton Underground Track-Detector, Rome, Italy, 29-31 Oct 1981.]The excavation for Soudan 2 was done in 1984-1985. Installation was started in 1986 and was completed in 1993. The experiment was run from April 1989 to June 2001, beginning with a partial detector of 275 tons. [http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/experiments/www2?expt=SOUDAN "Results From The Soudan Prototype Proton Decay Experiment",John Eric Bartelt (
University of Minnesota ). UMI-84-13752, Mar 1984.Ph. D. Thesis.] It was disassembled in 2005 to make room for further low background physics experiments.External links
* [http://www.hep.umn.edu/soudan/ The University of Minnesota's Soudan 2 page]
* [http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/Neutrino/stassina.htm Argyrios Stassinakis's thesis: A Study of the Atmospheric Neutrino Flavour Content Using the Soudan 2 Detector]
References
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