The Underground Laboratory of Modane
French version
The Underground Laboratory of Modane(LSM) is dedicated to research activities
under the responsability of Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules (IN2P3) from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and of Direction des Sciences de la Matière (DSM) from Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique (CEA).
This laboratory is placed in the middle of the tunnel of Fréjus which links Modane to Bardonecchia through France-Italy border, at 1260 m high,
It was created in 1982, with the tunnel.
It's made of a principal hall 31 m height, 10 m de width and 11 m hight and several small
rooms. The big hall receives the NEMO and EDELWEISS experiments.
Numerous germanium detectors are installed in "white rooms" to measure low activities
(oceanography, materials measurements environment controles). Carbon 14 counters allow to date archeologic materials.
Why choosing such a site ?
The decision to build a laboratory in deep underground, about under 1800 m of rock,
was motivated by experiments needing to be protected from cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays arrive at Earth surface with high energies and produce particle gerbes in the atmosphere
which reach the ground. Those particles produce a background in the signal of certain rare phenomena
as the study of proton decay.
This experiment was the first one to be installed in LSM and motivated its creation.
Thanks to its rocky cover, the muon and neutron flux are respectively reduced by a factor
1 million and 100 000.
How does it work ?
There is no permanent searchers in LSM. They are attached to their laboratory from CEA
or CNRS or foreign labs.
They install their experiment, the controle is then done with the help of
the four permanent technicians and by remote computers.
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