It’s an exciting week for SuperNEMO as we move another step closer to data, by closing our tracker.

The mammoth task involved a huge collaborative effort. Craig Martin and Martin Kemp of UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey, UK, led the operation, along with Christian Bourgeois’s engineering team, including technicians Bruno and Remy from the Laboratoire de l’Accelerateur Lineaire in Orsay, France. Physicists Anastasia Basharina-Freshville and Dave Waters of UCL, Cloé Girard-Carillo of LAL, and Ramon Salazar of University of Texas at Austin/University of Bordeaux assisted.

The two tracker halves are now joined

In a true display of girl power, Anastasia and Cloé used hydraulic jacks to slowly and carefully move three tonnes of SuperNEMO tracker into position, enclosing our double-beta decaying selenium source foils between the two halves of the tracker. The next step will be to attach the final calorimeter wall, meaning that the whole detector will be assembled and ready for cabling and commissioning.

What a great example of team work!