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The KamLAND Detector
The KamLAND detector is located in the Kamioka mine in Japan. The detector is made up of the outer detector and an inner detector. The outer detector is a water Cerenkov detector that acts as a veto for cosmic muons. The inner detector consists of a metal sphere with ~2100 photomultiplier tubes distributed evenly over its area. A balloon suspended in the sphere contains a specially designed mineral oil which emits light when charged particles move through it. Keeping the balloon stable is an outer layer of plain mineral oil referred to as the buffer oil. When a charged particle moves through the liquid in the balloon light is produced which propagates through the oil and is detected by the photomultiplier tubes. The photomultiplier tubes translate the light into a voltage. Each photomultiplier tube has electronics which digitize the voltage and send it onto computers to be stored for analysis at another time.
