Work Begins on U.S.-Chinese Neutrino Detector

[Fortunate]

The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment is designed to measure Θ13, the only one of nine “mixing angles” that has not been accurately determined.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/31480;jsessionid=EE9ABA1C3B17F0E35B2F3C2F04B5EAA5


Being built in hills close to a nuclear power plant in Daya Bay, the experiment is set to collect its first data in 2011.

[Manchurian Taikonaut]

The project costs roughly 400 million yuan (50 million U.S. dollars), building projects is cheap in China, it is a much better price than the cancelled Superconducting Collider

[ASEI]

Will any of the reactions in the power plant be a source of neutrino interference? It's hard to beat the sun, but still...

50 million dollars - that is bargain basement. A cornflake factory could afford one!

[Gsquare]

Will any of the reactions in the power plant be a source of neutrino interference? It's hard to beat the sun, but still...
!


Well, I think that is the whole idea, ASEI, to pick up the antineutrinos coming from the reactor.

That's how they were originally detected and studied, you know, at Savannah river.
http://www.ps.uci.edu/physics/news/nuexpt.html

G^2 ;)

[Fortunate]

Will any of the reactions in the power plant be a source of neutrino interference? It's hard to beat the sun....

I think we want to place detectors close enough to the source of the neutrinos that their distances from the source will be commensurate with the period of the oscillation.


Located about 55km north-east of Hong Kong, the experiment will consist of a set of eight detectors, each filled with 20 tonnes of gadolinium-doped liquid scintillator and placed in tunnels at 360 m, 500 m and 1800 m from the centre of the reactor complex. The idea is that each day the detectors will capture a few thousand electron antineutrinos emitted by the reactions taking place in the power station, in order to measure how the neutrino flux from the reactors varies as a function of distance.

The sun is too far away to measure what we need to measure to determine the value of theta13.

[Fortunate]

Apparently the determination of theta13 is expected to be quite difficult. I think that T2K in Japan and Nova in the U.S. will also work to this same end, the three projects seen more as complementary than competitive.