The Super-Kamiokande Experiment

Super-Kamiokande is a 50 kiloton water Cherenkov detector located at the Kamioka Observatory of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo. It was designed to study neutrino oscillations and carry out searches for the decay of the nucleon. The Super-Kamiokande experiment began in 1996 and in the ensuing 10 years of running has produced extremely important results in the fields of atmospheric and solar neutrino oscillations. Furthermore, it has set stringent limits on the decay of the nucleon and the existence of dark matter and astrophysical sources of neutrinos. Perhaps most crucially, Super-Kamiokande was the first to definitively show that neutrinos have mass and undergo flavor oscillations. This chapter will summarize the published scientific output of the experiment with a particular emphasis on the atmospheric neutrino results.