The International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) was founded in 1978 and was the first institution in Italy to promote post-graduate courses leading to a Doctor Philosophiae (or PhD) degree. A centre of excellence among Italian and international universities, the school has around 65 teachers, 100 post docs and 245 PhD students, and is located in Trieste, in a campus of more than 10 hectares with wonderful views over the Gulf of Trieste.
SISSA hosts a very high-ranking, large and multidisciplinary scientific research output. The scientific papers produced by its researchers are published in high impact factor, well-known international journals, and in many cases in the world's most prestigious scientific journals such as Nature and Science. Over 900 students have so far started their careers in the field of mathematics, physics and neuroscience research at SISSA.
The OPERA experiment in the CERN to Gran Sasso neutrino beam
R Acquafredda, T Adam, N Agafonova, P Alvarez Sanchez, M Ambrosio, A Anokhina, S Aoki, A Ariga, T Ariga, L Arrabito, C Aufranc, D Autiero, A Badertscher, A Bagulya, E Baussan, A Bergnoli, F Bersani Greggio, A Bertolin, M Besnier, D Biaré, D Bick, S Blin, K Borer, J Boucrot, D Boutigny, V Boyarkin, C Bozza, T Brugière, R Brugnera, G Brunetti, S Buontempo, J E Campagne, B Carlus, E Carrara, A Cazes, L Chaussard, M Chernyavsky, V Chiarella, N Chon-Sen, A Chukanov, R Ciesielski, L Consiglio, M Cozzi, G D'Amato, F Dal Corso, N D'Ambrosio, J Damet, C de La Taille, G De Lellis, Y Déclais, T Descombes, M De Serio, F Di Capua, D Di Ferdinando, A Di Giovanni, N Di Marco, C Di Troia, N Dick, S Dmitrievski, A Dominjon, M Dracos, D Duchesneau, B Dulach, S Dusini, J Ebert, I Efthymiopoulos, O Egorov, K Elsener, R Enikeev, A Ereditato, L S Esposito, C Fanin, J Favier, G Felici, T Ferber, R Fini, L Fournier, A Franceschi, D Frekers, T Fukuda, C Fukushima, V I Galkin, V A Galkin, R Gallet, S Gardien, A Garfagnini, G Gaudiot, G Giacomelli, M Giorgini, C Girerd, C Goellnitz, T Goeltzenlichter, J Goldberg, D Golubkov, Y Gornushkin, J-N Grapton, G Grella, F Grianti, E Gschwendtner, C Guerin, M Guler, C Gustavino, J-L Guyonnet, C Hagner, T Hamane, T Hara, M Hauger, M Hess, M Hierholzer, K Hoshino, M Ieva, M Incurvati, K Jakovcic, J Janicsko Csathy, B Janutta, C Jollet, F Juget, M Kazuyama, S H Kim, N Khovansky, M Kimura, B Klicek, J Knuesel, K Kodama, D Kolev, M Komatsu, U Kose, A Krasnoperov, I Kreslo, Z Krumstein, V V Kutsenov, V A Kuznetsov, I Laktineh, M Lavy, C Lazzaro, T D Le, T Le Flour, J Lenkeit, J Lewis, S Lieunard, A Ljubicic, A Longhin, G Lutter, A Malgin, K Manai, G Mandrioli, A Marotta, J Marteau, G Martin-Chassard, V Matveev, N Mauri, M Meddahi, F Meisel, A Meregaglia, A Meschini, M Messina, P Migliozzi, P Monacelli, I Monteiro, F Moreau, K Morishima, U Moser, M T Muciaccia, P Mugnier, N Naganawa, M Nakamura, T Nakano, T Napolitano, V Nikitina, K Niwa, Y Nonoyama, A Nozdrin, S Ogawa, A Olchevski, D Orlandi, G Orlova, V Osedlo, D Ossetski, M Paniccia, A Paoloni, B D Park, I G Park, A Pastore, L Patrizii, L Pellegrino, E Pennacchio, H Pessard, V Pilipenko, C Pistillo, N Polukhina, M Pozzato, K Pretzl, P Publichenko, F Pupilli, L Raux, J P Repellin, R Rescigno, D Rizhikov, T Roganova, G Romano, G Rosa, I Rostovtseva, A Rubbia, A Russo, V Ryasny, O Ryazhskaya, A Sadovski, C Sanelli, O Sato, Y Sato, V Saveliev, G Sazhina, A Schembri, W Schmidt Parzefall, H Schroeder, H U Schütz, J Schuler, L Scotto Lavina, J Serrano, H Shibuya, S Simone, M Sioli, C Sirignano, G Sirri, J S Song, M Spinetti, L Stanco, N Starkov, M Stipcevic, T Strauss, P Strolin, V Sugonyaev, S Takahashi, V Talochkin, M Tenti, V Tereschenko, F Terranova, I Tezuka, V Tioukov, P Tolun, V Tsarev, R Tsenov, S Tufanli, U Ugolino, N Ushida, G Van Beek, V Verguilov, T Viant, P Vilain, M Vladimirov, L Votano, J L Vuilleumier, T Waelchli, M Weber, G Wilquet, B Wonsak, J Wurtz, V Yakushev, C S Yoon, Y Zaitsev, A Zghiche and R Zimmermann
Published 29 April 2009 •
Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd
Journal of Instrumentation,
Volume 4,
April 2009
Citation R Acquafredda et al 2009 JINST4 P04018DOI 10.1088/1748-0221/4/04/P04018
The OPERA neutrino oscillation experiment has been designed
to prove the appearance of ντ in a nearly pure νμbeam (CNGS) produced at CERN and detected in the underground Hall C
of the Gran Sasso Laboratory, 730 km away from the source. In
OPERA, τ leptons resulting from the interaction of ντare produced in target units called bricks made of nuclear emulsion
films interleaved with lead plates. The OPERA target contains 150000
of such bricks, for a total mass of 1.25 kton, arranged into walls
interleaved with plastic scintillator strips. The detector is split
into two identical supermodules, each supermodule containing a
target section followed by a magnetic spectrometer for momentum and
charge measurement of penetrating particles. Real time information
from the scintillators and the spectrometers provide the
identification of the bricks where the neutrino interactions
occurred. The candidate bricks are extracted from the walls and,
after X-ray marking and an exposure to cosmic rays for alignment,
their emulsion films are developed and sent to the emulsion scanning
laboratories to perform the accurate scan of the event. In this
paper, we review the design and construction of the detector and of
its related infrastructures, and report on some technical
performances of the various components. The construction of the
detector started in 2003 and it was completed in Summer 2008. The
experiment is presently in the data taking phase. The whole sequence
of operations has proven to be successful, from triggering to brick
selection, development, scanning and event analysis.