Soudan 2 was a

particle detector In experimental and applied particle physics, nuclear physics, and nuclear engineering, a particle detector, also known as a radiation detector, is a device used to detect, track, and/or identify ionizing elementary particle, particles, such as t ...

located in the

Soudan Mine The Lake Vermilion-Soudan Underground Mine State Park is a Minnesota state park at the site of the Soudan Underground Mine, on the south shore of Lake Vermilion, in the Vermilion Range (Minnesota). The mine is known as Minnesota's oldest, dee ...

in Northern Minnesota, United States, that operated from 1989 to 2001. It was a 960-ton iron tracking

calorimeter A calorimeter is a device used for calorimetry, or the process of measuring the heat of chemical reactions or physical changes as well as heat capacity. Differential scanning calorimeters, isothermal micro calorimeters, titration calorimeters ...

whose primary purpose was to search for proton decay, although its data were also used to investigate the properties of

neutrinos A neutrino ( ; denoted by the Greek letter ) is an elementary particle that interacts via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass is so small ('' -ino'') that it ...

. It found no evidence of proton decay, but it did help confirm

Super-Kamiokande Super-Kamiokande (abbreviation of Super-Kamioka Neutrino Detection Experiment, also abbreviated to Super-K or SK; ) is a neutrino detector, neutrino observatory located Kamioka Observatory, under Mount Ikeno near the city of Hida, Gifu, Hida, ...

's atmospheric neutrino result, supporting the theory of

neutrino oscillation Neutrino oscillation is a quantum mechanics, quantum mechanical phenomenon in which a neutrino created with a specific lepton lepton number, family number ("lepton flavor": electron, muon, or tau lepton, tau) can later be Quantum measurement, mea ...

. The Soudan Mine was also home to the

MINOS Main injector neutrino oscillation search (MINOS) was a particle physics experiment designed to study the phenomena of neutrino oscillations, first discovered by a Super-Kamiokande (Super-K) experiment in 1998. Neutrinos produced by the NuMI ...

and CDMS detectors.

History

Soudan 2 was the successor to the Soudan 1, a similar 30 ton detector also intended to search for proton decay. The excavation for Soudan 2 was done in 1984–1985. Installation was started in 1986 and was completed in 1993. The experiment was run from April 1989 to June 2001, beginning with a partial detector of 275 tons.Bartelt, John Eric (March 1984)
''Results from the Soudan Prototype Proton Decay Experiment''
Ph.D. thesis.

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

). UMI-84-13752. It was disassembled in 2005 to make room for further low background physics experiments, including

References

External links

The University of Minnesota's Soudan 2 page

Argyrios Stassinakis's thesis: A Study of the Atmospheric Neutrino Flavour Content Using the Soudan 2 Detector

SOUDAN-2 experiment
record on

INSPIRE-HEP INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1 ...

{{coord, 47.82066, -92.24221, display=title Buildings and structures in St. Louis County, Minnesota Particle experiments