A European Magnet Being Installed at T2K Pit
A giant magnet is now being installed at a pit of the T2K long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. This magnet has been a part of historical UA1 detector at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which has been donated to KEK for the T2K collaboration.
Weighing 900 tons in total, the magnet yokes consist of 16 C-shaped pieces of 6.1m by 2.8m iron blocks. The work begun from April and the installation will be completed by the end of June.
A powerful proton accelerator called J-PARC (Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex) will produce neutrinos at the rate of some thousands of trillions per second. The magnet will help measuring the momentum of the particles observed at the near detector of T2K, which is located at J-PARC, providing information of the generated neutrinos being delivered to Super-Kamiokande, a 5000 ton water cerenkov neutrino detector located 295 km west of J-PARC.
Two institutions, Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) and High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), are jointly constructing J-PARC since 2001. It is built at the Tokai Campus of JAEA, which is located approximately 100 km northeast of Tokyo. The 3 GeV rapid cycling synchrotron (RCS) will be used for a 1 MW neutron spallation source and muon source. The 50 GeV synchrotron with 0.75 MW proton beams will generate various secondary particles, such as neutrinos for T2K experiment and kaon beams for the study of kaonic nuclei, hypernuclei and kaon rare-decays.
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