ASPERA: How do you ship a magnet weighing more than 1000 tons (the equivalent of the take-off weight of four Boeing 747s) from Europe to Japan? Partly by breaking it up into smaller pieces say physicists from CERN who have donated the NOMAD magnet and other related equipment to Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization KEK. In January, 35 containers were filled with 150 pieces for a long voyage by truck, train and boat.

The equipment, worth millions of dollars, will be used in the T2K (Tokai to Kamiokande) experiment that will start operation in the autumn of 2009. The J-PARC accelerators at Tokai will send a 40 GeV proton beam to a target to produce an intense low-energy neutrino beam directed towards Super-Kamiokande, Japan’s neutrino observatory 300 km away. “We hope that it will be the most intense neutrino beam ever produced” says André Rubbia from the ETH Institute for particle physics of Zurich.

The beam will look to see if the neutrinos oscillate between the three types of neutrino. To date, only the first two of the three mixing angles have been measured precisely. The T2K experiment will attempt to determine the third, which is the “Holy Grail” for neutrino physicists.