ICARUS Experiment

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As a first part of the experimental programme proposed by the ICARUS Collaboration, a first detector, "ICARUS T600" , with 600 t of active liquid Argon mass, has been built for an extensive physics programme at Gran Sasso Laboratory.

The ICARUS T600 project was fully approved and financed during the years 1996-97 and the construction started immediately after. The detector has been assembled by the end of 2000. taken during the construction in Pavia (INFN site)
A full test of the experimental set-up was foreseen, prior to its final installation at GranSasso.

Following this plan, the test run has been performed in Pavia,near Milan (Italy): the start-up operations begun on April 23rd, 2001 and, after smooth vacuum pumping and cool-down procedures, one of the two half-modules (300t of LAr) of the T600 has been filled with ultra-purified liquid Argon (LAr). The inner detector (Time Projection Chambers) was instrumented with the read-out electronics and the HV was rised-up to nominal voltage.
Immediately, first long muon tracks have been detected (June, 2nd 2001).

A large data sample of cosmic ray events has been collected with various trigger logic's, including the external (vertical and horizontal) trigger systems, the internal PMT trigger system and combinations of the two.

The last three weeks of the run (up untill beginning of August 2001) were dedicated to smooth data acquisition, aiming to collect cosmic events with unprecedented richness of detail .

On August 10th, the LAr has been evacuated and the run was ended after about 100 days of continuous, fully successful operation. The results of this test gives the proof that the liquid Argon technology we have been developing for many years, has reached maturity.

Presently, the inner detector of the second half-module is being completed. The ICARUS T600 detector will be transported to the Gran Sasso Laboratory and deployed in the underground experimental Hall-B by the end-2002/beginning-2003 to start data taking.
It will act as a necessary demonstrational premise for a larger scale detector with a considerable experimental impact, commensurate with the potentialities of such a novel technology in which both high visual resolution and accurate calorimetry are combined.

The experimental programme, with ICARUS T600, is a self-contained programme, with significant physics potentialities, combined with aspects of technological development in view of the operability of liquid Argon "bubble chamber" detectors with much larger mass.
It opens the way to a truly second generation quality (simultaneous) observation of long baseline neutrinos, cosmic ray and solar neutrinos and proton decay in the Gran Sasso Lab.