The Super-Kamiokande experiment

The Super-Kamiokande experiment is a multi purpose experiment using a large imaging water Cherenkov detector with 50,000 tons of pure water. The detector is located 1000 m underground in the Kamioka mine in Japan, and it can detect particle interactions whose visible energies are between 5 MeV and 100 GeV, so that we can study many physics subjects as follows. Solar neutrino problem is one of the most important unsolved problems in astrophysics. Kamiokande experiment confirmed the deficit of neutrino flux compared to the standard Solar model prediction, which was first reported by R. Davis's pioneering work. Currently it is widely believed that the deficit is due to the neutrino oscillation. The Super-Kamiokande is a unique detector to measure the distortion of the energy spectrum of neutrinos, variation of the neutrino flux between day and night, and the seasonal variation of the flux. Those are related to the neutrino oscillation and independent of the Solar model uncertainty. Atmospheric neutrino anomaly was first announced by Kamiokande experiment, and the Super-Kamiokande recently provided clear evidence for neutrino oscillation as the solution to the anomaly. Observed ratio of muons to electrons is significantly smaller than what is expected. Moreover, zenith-angle distribution of observed muon neutrinos shows the strong up-down asymmetry. The zenith angle distribution of upward-going muons provides another information and the result also supports the oscillation hypothesis. We investigate not only the Solar neutrino problem and atmospheric neutrino anomaly, but also other astrophysical neutrino phenomena such as neutrino bursts from supernova explosions, high energy neutrino emission from point sources, neutrino events in correlation with Solar flares, and gamma-ray bursts. Search for nucleon decay is also one of the primary objectives of our experiment. However no evidence for nucleon decay has been observed yet, and we only set a lower limit on the partial lifetime of nucleon to decay via several decay modes. We here present an overview of the Super-Kamiokande experiment, and, with data corresponding to more than 1000 live days, we also present the updated results on the Solar neutrinos, atmospheric neutrinos, and so on. (author)