The CDHS Neutrino Experiment

 
CERN 
DORTMUND 
HEIDELBERG 
SACLAY 
WARSAW

The CDHS neutrino experiment at CERN was a collaboration of CERN, Dortmund, Heidelberg and Saclay (later joined by Warsaw) led by Jack Steinberger. The experiment was designed to study deep inelastic neutrino interactions in iron. The detector had a mass of 1250 tons and combined the functions of a muon spectrometer and hadron calorimeter. It consisted of 19 magnetized iron modules, separated from each other by wire drift chambers.
The experiment took data in the CERN neutrino beams from December 1976 until 1984.
The main interactions studied were charged currents:
n + Fe --> m + anything
and neutral currents:
n + Fe --> n + anything
Later, a 31 m3 liquid hydrogen tank was placed in front of the experiment to study neutrino interactions in hydrogen.

Picture Gallery


CDHS 1978

CDHS side view

John Rander's cartoon

Neutrino tomography

Di-muon event
from first publication

An early publication

Electroweak parameters

Four-muon event
In 35 publications, the collaboration has made significant contributions e.g. in the following fields:
  • Neutrino- and antineutrino-nucleon total cross-sections
  • Structure functions
  • Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa mixing matrix
  • Electroweak parameters
  • The nature of multimuon events could be explained in terms of the standard model or of standard physics phenomena
  • Upper limits for neutrino oscillations


    • A history of neutrino experiments can be found here.

    Juergen Knobloch