SuperNEMO has reached an extremely important milestone today, as the Demonstrator Module detector has finally been closed. This is a great achievement by the team, and a huge step towards starting to collect data.

Closing the detector The SuperNEMO detector, closed and ready for cabling

This week, a calorimeter wall, consisting of 260 optical modules that will measure particles’ energy, was pushed up against the rest of the detector. Already in place were another calorimeter wall, and the double beta-decaying source foils, sandwiched between the two tracker modules. The heavy wall, which is over 3 metres long and 4 metres wide, had to be moved using a combination of hydraulic jacks and a special crane.

Now that the final wall is bolted into place, this completes the main mechanical construction of the SuperNEMO demonstrator module. The next phase - plugging in thousands of cables to measure the signal in the tracker wires, optical modules, and calibration system, is already underway.

This is fantastic news, and definitely something for us to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving day! Congratulations to Christian Bourgeois and his team from LAL in Orsay, and to everyone else who has worked so hard to make this happen.