Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus

Welcome to the OPERA Web Home Page

OPERA is a massive lead/emulsion target for a long-baseline neutrino oscillation search. The experiment can perform an appearance search for nm-ntoscillation in the parameter region indicated by the atmospheric neutrino anomaly. It exploits nuclear emulsion for the unambiguous detection of the decay of the t produced in ntCC interactions. OPERA will run at the LNGS in the future NGS neutrino beam from CERN.

A detector target mass of ~1 kton is needed to reach a sensitivity in Dm2 of 10-3 eV2 . Such a goal, impossible to reach with pure emulsion target, is achieved by means of a new technique based on the Emulsion Cloud Chamber (ECC). The ECC provides a massive target made up of a sandwich of dense passive material (Fe, Pb) plates and thin emulsion sheets. The emulsion is used only for tracking and t decays are identified by a direct kink detection.

A fully scalable detector can be built on the basis of supermodules, consisting of a target section followed by a muon detection system for background reduction. The target is subdivided into "bricks", consisting of a sequence of elementary cells, arranged in a plane structure. Electronic detectors, placed behind each target module, are needed to identify the actual brick where the neutrino interaction took place and to guide the scanning.


The (present) Collaboration:

Mailing lists


Reference material:

OPERA Internal


Related Links:

NGS Project at CERN
CERN 98-02 The CERN neutrino beam to Gran Sasso (NGS)
Minutes of the joint SPSC-LNGSC meeting held at CERN on November 3-4, 1998.
Long Baseline Newsletter
Neutrino Oscillation Industry

Giuliana Fiorillo