424 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 64 



As the spot chosen at the Savannah Kiver Plant reactor was only 

 large enough to hold the detector, we would have to send the electrical 

 pulses from it to the equipment some distance away. We decided to 

 build all of our electronic gear into a large trailer which would then 

 act as our laboratory. Holding amplifiers, coincidence and gating 

 circuits, scalers and recording equipment, some 12 racks finally lined 

 one side of the trailer from floor to ceiling. A blower and conduit 

 outside the trailer served to keep the equipment cool while it was 

 operating. 



To prepare and handle the liquid scintillator, a "tank farm" was 

 built on a flat bed trailer. This consisted of three steel tanks, each of 

 1200-gallon capacity. The tanks were coated on their interior sur- 

 faces with an epoxy paint to preserve the purity of the liquids and 

 were wrapped with several layers of insulating material on their out- 

 sides. As the tanks must never be allowed to fall below about 60° 

 F. when they contain scintillator, long strips of electrical heating 

 elements were embedded in the exterior insulation. A network of 

 stainless steel pipe, valves, and pumps complete the tank farm. (See 

 pi. 3.) 



The year was spent in building and testing. It was important that 

 we know the details of the performance of our system quite well before 

 we left home. The effects of the ever-present cosmic ray muons were 

 also determined in great detail. 



In November 1955, we were ready to leave Los Alamos again in 

 quest of neutrinos. Early one morning, after a blessing of the group 

 and its equipment by Father Francis Schuler, the Catholic pastor of the 

 parish at Los Alamos, in the ancient Latin phrases that down through 

 the centuries have sent men across the world in search of knowledge 

 and adventure, our little convoy snaked down the mountainside and 

 set out for South Carolina. 



The work at the Savannah River Plant 



The new year found our detector installed near the great reactor, 

 with its pipes and bundles of wires and coaxial cables running to the 

 laboratory and tank farm trailers parked outside. Calibrations were 

 undertaken using artificial radioactive sources and the cosmic rays, 

 and backgrounds were measured in the myriad different forms they 

 assume in such equipment. By early spring we felt that we were ready 

 for our quariy. (See pi. 1.) 



The bait that we were using was hydrogen — or rather the nuclei of 

 hydrogen, protons. Let us review the anticipated reaction and the 

 signals produced which would demonstrate that antineutrinos were, 

 in truth, coming from the reactor. Of the several hundred million 

 billion antineutrinos which should (according to theory and the known 

 power level of the reactor) be streaming through our detector each 



