New wings give ICARUS flight for second neutrino hunt
It's a big shining box, 4 metres high, 20 metres long: this magnificent detector arrived at CERN 16 months ago and since then it is undergoing a complete refurbishing. ICARUS, a 760-ton detector filled with liquid argon (LAr) whose technology was first proposed by Carlo Rubbia in 1977, was used between 2010 and 2014 at the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy to study neutrino oscillations using a beam of neutrinos produced at CERN. After its overhaul at CERN, which should last until the end of 2016, it will be shipped to Chicago to start a second life. It will be part of the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) programme at Fermilab, dedicated to the study of sterile neutrinos (see Box). The refurbishment is part of the CERN Neutrino Platform (CENF) project, started in 2014, to follow the recommendations of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, and it is done in...