The Super-Kamiokande Experiment

Abstract

Super-Kamiokande is a 50 kiloton water Cherenkov detector located at the Kamioka Observatory of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo. It was designed to study neutrino oscillations and carry out searches for the decay of the nucleon. The Super-Kamiokande experiment began in 1996 and in the ensuing decade of running has produced extremely important results in the fields of atmospheric and solar neutrino oscillations, along with setting stringent limits on the decay of the nucleon and the existence of dark matter and astrophysical sources of neutrinos. Perhaps most crucially, Super-Kamiokande for the first time definitively showed that neutrinos have mass and undergo flavor oscillations. This chapter will summarize the published scientific output of the experiment with a particular emphasis on the atmospheric neutrino results.Comment: Prepared for inclusion in "Neutrino Oscillations: Present Status and Future Plans", J. Thomas and P. Vahle editors, World Scientific Publishing Company, 2008. This version is 12 pages in REVTeX4 two-column forma