MUNU

Home page of the Experiment: http://isnwww.in2p3.fr/munu/munu.html

The detector consists of a 1 m3 acrylic vessel TPC immersed into 10 m3 of liquid scintillator working as anti-Compton. The filling gas of the TPC is CF4 at 3 bar; its electrons are the target for the anti(ne)-e- interaction. Since the expected event rate is low (~6/day from weak interactions) it has been necessary to minimize all possible background sources and to construct each part of the detector from selected low radioactivity material.

The detector has been mounted in a laboratory underneath a 2800 MW nuclear reactor in Bugey, at 18 m from the core.

Finally we point out that the MUNU detector is the first one doing neutrino spectroscopy in the MeV region by measuring both the energy and the direction of the recoiling electrons. From this point of view it can be regarded as a low background prototype of a detector for the spectroscopy of the low energy neutrinos from the Sun (pp and 7Be).