SOUDAN 2 nuclear decay experiment. Progress report

Construction of the experiment cavern on the 27th level of the SOUDAN iron mine in northern Minnesota began early this year and will be complete early in 1985. The first 1200 tons of the detector itself is also under construction in the US and UK; installation will begin in mid 1985. Physics exploitation will begin early in 1986 and the first 1200 ton module will be complete early in 1987. The detector may be expanded to between 3 and 5 such modules in the cavern. The detector is an iron tracking calorimeter (rho = 2) consisting of stacks of corrugated steel sheets each 1.2 mm thick. The corrugations form hexagonal channels 1 m long and 16 mm in diameter. A uniform electric field along these channels is provided by the voltage grading arising from the constant standing current in the Hytrel tubes (rho = 2 x 1012 Ω cm) that line each channel. The tubes are insulated from the steel by sheets of mylar. Ionization in the gas in the tubes drifts in the uniform field to the end of the tube where it is amplified linearly and detected by a matrix of anode wires and cathode strips. The electronics registers both the drift time and the pulse height of all signals