Soudan nucleon decay program

The Soudan nucleon decay program is being carried out in the Soudan iron mine in northeastern Minnesota, at a depth of 2000 m of water equivalent. A 30-ton prototype experiment, Soudan 1, has been built and is now being operated by a University of Minnesota - Argonne National Laboratory collaboration. The detector is a block of iron-loaded concrete instrumented with 3456 gas proportional tubes. It can detect nucleon decay at the 2 x 1030 year level, and will measure cosmic-ray induced backgrounds. Soudan 1 is also obtaining data on very high energy cosmic-ray interactions. Monte-Carlo predictions of performance have been checked by calibration of a detector module in a charged-particle test beam. A proposal to build a 1000-ton experiment, Soudan 2, has been submitted to funding agencies in the USA and the UK by a Minnesota - Argonne - Oxford University collaboration. The proposed detector utilizes drift chambers with 50-cm drifts to obtain very fine-grained ionization and tracking information at low cost. This tracking-calorimeter detector has a fiducial mass of 650 tons, and could be operating in 1985. A drifting scheme utilizing 50 cm x 5 m x 1 cm planar chambers has been shown feasible, and prototypes of alternate drifting structures are also being studied. A plan to provide expandability to an eventual 5000 tons has been developed