Exploded view of a Double Chooz detector
Neutrinos are quite remarkable elementary particles which are produced in great abundance in the sun, in the atmosphere and at the core of nuclear power reactors. DAPNIA has been interested in them for a very long time. It has now been established that although they are very light, neutrinos do not have zero mass. It remains to be determined how these masses are distributed among the three known varieties of neutrino: ne, nμ and nτ
last update : 10-18 00:00:00-2005 (529)
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16-04-2010
Thierry Lasserre, a physicist at IRFU, has received the Bronze medal in the CNRS awards for 2009
On April 14, Thierry Lasserre received the CNRS bronze medal from the new director of the In2p3, Jacques Martino. Since 1954, CNRS has awarded three medals each year to renowned researchers or promising young scientists. This Bronze Medal rewards a researcher's first work, which marks that person as a promising specialist in his or her field. The work of Thierry Lasserre concerned the most abundant massive particle in the universe: the neutrino. |
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04-03-2011
IRFU's Double Chooz group has just published some surprising results regarding the flux of antineutrinos generated by uranium and plutonium fission products in nuclear power reactors. A more precise estimate of this flux has revealed a +3% shift with respect to the predictions considered as the benchmark for the past 25 years. The re-analysis of the most important past reactor neutrino experimental results, in the light of this new flux prediction, lead to the so called 'reactor antineutrino anomaly'. Including other effects such as the evolution of the neutron lifetime and the presence of long-lived fission isotopes, the averaged shortfall in the number of antineutrinos detected at short ... More » |
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23-12-2010
The Double Chooz collaboration recently completed its neutrino detector which will see anti-neutrinos coming from the Chooz nuclear power plant in the French Ardennes. The experiment is now ready to take data in order to measure fundamental neutrino properties with important consequences for particle and astro-particle physics.
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09-02-2010
A company from the Vosges Department in France, NEOTEC, received the 2009 "Outstanding Implementations" award, at the International MIDEST Exhibition attended by the Industry Minister, Christian Estrosi, for their production of very special chambers. This equipment forms part of an important component of the Double-Chooz experiment which, before the end of the year, will measure neutrinos emitted by the reactor at the Chooz nuclear power station in the Ardennes.
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26-11-2010
In August 2010 at CERN in Geneva, a team of physicists from SEDI and SPP working in collaboration with a group from ETH-Zurich obtained the first successful results from a MicroMegas detector operating in a time projection chamber filled with pure cryogenic argon at a temperature of 87.2 kelvin.
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02-06-2009
The second phase of the Double Chooz international experiment officially began on Wednesday 20 May. The Declaration of Intent signed by the four partners (CEA, CNRS, EDF, Champagne-Ardenne Region) is the first step in the plan to build a second detector devoted to neutrino research next to the Chooz nuclear power plant.
Prior to signing the DOI, the participants visited the site of the first detector, currently under construction. By the end of the year, the detector should pick up the first neutrinos emitted by the plant and attempt to measure the disappearance of primary flux neutrinos. The second detector, which will be operational two years from now, will provide precise ... More » |
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16-02-2010
In Japan at the end of January 2010, the detectors of the Tokai to Superkamiokande (T2K, [ti:tu:kei]), developed at Saclay, observed their first neutrinos. These detectors consist of two large chambers where the tracks of charged particles are able to be reconstructed and the neutrino beam can be characterized. In this experiment, neutrinos are created by a proton beam coming from the Tokai accelerator. These same neutrinos are then measured 300 km away, at Kamioka, in a large water vessel 40 m in diameter and 40 m high, which was previously used to study neutrinos coming from cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere and to definitively prove the phenomena of neutrino oscillation ... More » |
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14-09-2009
Engineers and physicists from IRFU have successfully assembled and commissioned three large chambers designed to reconstruct charged particle tracks. The chambers will characterize the neutrino beam used in the T2K (Tokai to Kamiokande) experiment. They are the first large Time Projection Chambers (TPCs) to be equipped with micromesh gas detectors (Micromegas). The chambers have a very large sensitive area (nearly 9m²) and a correspondingly high number of electronic channels (124,000). IRFU built the entire detection system of the three TPCs, comprising 72 Micromegas detectors and all the front-end electronics. Engineers from SEDI, a department specialised in ... More » |
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