Super Kamiokande Scientific Interaction, Japan

Worlds Largest Neutrino Detector

Super-Kamiokande is the large water Cherenkov detector. The Super-Kamiokande is operated by an international collaboration of about 150 people and about 40 institutes from Japan, the United States, Korea, China, Poland, Spain, Canada, UK, Italy and France.

The Super-Kamiokande detector consists of a stainless-steel tank, 39.3m diameter and 41.4m tall, filled with 50,000 tons of ultra pure water. About 13,000 photo-multipliers are installed on the tank wall. The detector is located at 1,000 meter underground in the Kamioka-mine, Hida-city, Gifu, Japan.

Only three or four supernovas happen in our galaxy every century. These are super-energetic events that release neutrinos at the speed of light. At the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan, a new computer system has been installed in order to monitor in real time and inform the scientific community of the arrival of these mysterious particles, which can offer crucial information on the collapse of stars and the formation of black holes. A kilometre underground, in the depths of a Japanese mine, scientists have built a tank of ultra-pure water inside a gigantic cylinder full of photomultiplier tubes. This is the Super-Kamiokande experiment, one of the major objectives of which is the detection of neutrinos -particles with near-zero mass- that come from nearby supernovas.

The problem is that these stellar explosions occur very infrequently: only three or four each century in our galaxy. For this reason, the members of the international Super-Kamiokande scientific collaboration want to be prepared for one of these rare phenomena and have built a 'monitor' that is constantly on the lookout for a nearby supernova.

Professor Rajesh Dubey is the only astrophysicist who was not only invited to this project for a scientific interaction with the scientists and researchers but also given the complete access for studying the construction and engineering of the project.