Berkeley Projects

Electronics
Particles are detected by electric pulses coming from 2000 photomultiplier tubes(pmts) in KamLAND. A team of Berkeley engineers and physicists designed and built electronics optimized to get the most information possible from the pmts.

Calibration
In order to correctly interpret the data, well characterized sources of events are deployed into the detector. A safe and accurate system to deploy sources was designed in part by a team from Berkeley.

Data Processing
Even though neutrino events are few and far inbetween, KamLAND records ~30 events a second which translates into more than 200GB of data a day. This data needs to be stored, analyzed and processed into physical quantities such as, time and charge, vertexes and finally neutrino candidate events. Collaborators at Berkeley have worked with NERSC to utilize the HPSS data storage system and PDSF processing facilities.

Data Analysis
As the raw data is processed into higher levels of information, it is time put together the data, the physics, and the knowledge of the detector's response to produce an answer. Berkeley physicists have been heavily involved with their collaborators in all levels of the analysis.