Super-Kamiokande

neutrino detector

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July 16, 2026

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Super-Kamiokande is a massive neutrino detector located in Japan. It is an underground facility filled with 50,000 tons of purified water, surrounded by sensitive light detectors. Its primary purpose is to detect neutrinos, which are subatomic particles with no electric charge and very little mass.12

Neutrinos are elusive because they interact very weakly with matter, allowing them to pass through vast amounts of material, like the Earth, without being detected. Super-Kamiokande was instrumental in proving that neutrinos can change from one type, or "flavor," to another as they travel. This phenomenon, known as neutrino oscillation, provided the first direct evidence that neutrinos have mass. This discovery has significant implications for our understanding of fundamental physics and the Standard Model.341

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Koshiba Masatoshi
…larger, more sensitive detector named Super-Kamiokande, which became operational in 1996, Koshiba found strong evidence for what scientists had already suspected—that neutrinos, of which three types are known, change from one type into another in flight.
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…larger, more sensitive detector named Super-Kamiokande, which became operational in 1996, Koshiba found strong evidence for what scientists had already suspected—that neutrinos, of which three types are known, change from one type into another in flight.
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Kajita Takaaki
…1996 Kamiokande-II was replaced by Super-Kamiokande, which contained 50,000 tons of water, and Kajita led the studies of the atmospheric neutrinos. After two years of observations, his team definitively confirmed that the number of muon neutrinos coming down from the atmosphere is greater than the number of muon neutrinos coming…
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…1996 Kamiokande-II was replaced by Super-Kamiokande, which contained 50,000 tons of water, and Kajita led the studies of the atmospheric neutrinos. After two years of observations, his team definitively confirmed that the number of muon neutrinos coming down from the atmosphere is greater than the number of muon neutrinos coming…
Read More