Staff

A. Bertolin (INFN), R. Brugnera, S. Dusini (INFN) , A. Garfagnini, A. Longhin, C. Sirignano, L. Stanco (INFN)

PostDoc/Ph.D

F. Pupilli

Collaborators

U. Kose (CERN, CH), F. Laudisio (INAF Padova), E. Medinaceli (INAF Bologna), M. Roda (Liverpool University, UK),

Research Activity

The OPERA experiment  commits a community of over one hundred physicists belonging to Italian, European and Japanese research institutions and universities; it has been designed and realized to get a direct evidence neutrino leptonic flavor oscillation in the ν_μ → ν_τ channel .
In order to observe this phenomenon, a pure ν_μ beam was produced at CERN in Geneva (2008-2012) and an active target was prepared at a distance of 732 km (INFN Gran Sasso  Underground National Laboratories).
In the case of oscillation, it is expected to observe a few ν_τ interactions.
The detector is made up of sandwiches of nuclear emulsion films and lead, so called ECC (Emulsion Cloud Chamber). Nuclear emulsions are an elementary particle detector characterized by an excellent spatial resolution (<1 μm).
The nt  interactions can be observed directly in the target by reconstructing the tau particle decay topology (cτ = 87.11 μm). The detector consisted of approximately 150,000 ECCs and the emulsion measurement was performed by automatic optical microscopes.
Up to now, OPERA has found 5 ν_τ interactions in a sample of 6500 fully analyzed neutrinos primary interactions.
These results confirmed the phenomenon of neutrino leptonic flavor oscillation with a statistical significance of 5σ.
The Padova Group effectively contributed in the design, construction, data collection and nuclear emulsions measurements in OPERA.
It is currently engaged in the data analysis phase.
Recently Padova group identified and studied the first observation of charmed particles produced in tau neutrino interaction.