The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Project

The construction of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) project was completed in April, 1998 and the detector is presently in operation as it is being filled with light and heavy water. The SNO detector is a 1,000 tonne heavy water Cerenkov detector situated 2,000 meters underground in INCO's Creighton Mine near Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.[1] The project is a Canadian, US and UK collaboration. Through the use of heavy water SNO will be able to detect a number of neutrino reactions, including one sensitive specifically to electron neutrinos and another one which is sensitive to all neutrino types. With these two reactions the detector will be used to search for solar neutrino flavour change without the requirement of electron neutrino flux normalization by solar model calculations. It will also provide unusual sensitivity for other measurements of solar neutrino properties, atmospheric neutrinos and supernova neutrinos.