OPERA

Home page of the Experiment: http://opera.web.cern.ch/opera/

The detector is based on the so-called ECC technique, a massive sandwich of lead plates and emulsion films, used as high space resolution tracking devices. Electronic detectors complement the experimental set-up, with the task of predicting the neutrino interaction point inside the brick target elements (target trackers) and to identify muons and measure their charge and momentum for background rejection (magnets, inner and precision trackers). The detector is based on a modular structure: about 235000 bricks are assembled in walls, in turn forming supermodules, each equipped with a muon spectrometer. The total detector mass amounts to about 2000 tons.

The sensitivity of OPERA in the oscillation parameters covers the region indicated by Super-Kamiokande. About 12 t events are expected in five years of standard CNGS running with a background of 0.75 events if oscillations occur at the central value indicated by Super-Kamiokande (sin22q=1 and Dm2=2.5x10-3 eV2). The low expected background contributes to the high discovery potential of the experiment.