NOMAD Activities

N.B. The NOMAD Project is no longer an active experiment.

The NOMAD collaboration is composed of about 150 physicists...

Every 14s, 10¹³ muon neutrinos coming from the CERN SPS go through the 3 ton target of the NOMAD detector. At each burst only one or two neutrino interact. Despite this low rate NOMAD can register up to 500,000 neutrino interactions per year. The hope of physicists is that among these interactions some are not due to muon neutrinos but to tau-neutrino.

This discovery would confirm the neutrino oscillation hypothesis : this fundamental phenomena implies that neutrinos are massive particles which would contribute to the hidden mass of the Universe. Moreover, the standard model of particle physics does not predict any masses for neutrino and therefore neutrino oscillation would mean an extension of this model.

Finally, in NOMAD if a muon neutrino - tau neutrino oscillation is seen, this will lead to the first direct detection of the tau neutrino (up to now it has only been indirectly detected via the presence of the tau lepton). If no tau neutrino is seen , NOMAD will have contributed to the exploration of the oscillation parameters as already done by many other experiments these last years. Moreover, thanks to its intrinsic characteristics, NOMAD will have improved previous studies made by various experiments (CDHS, CHARM and bubble chamber experiments) on neutrino interactions.