NOvA Ash River Laboratory Inaugurated

The Ash River faciility in Minnesota will house the detector for the NOvA neutrino experiment. It will receive the beam of neutrinos from Fermilab. The NOvA far detector, when complete, will be the largest plastic structure in the world. Sixteen-meter-long PVC tubes will form planes nearly 50 feet by 50 feet square. The planes will be stacked and glued 32 layers at a time and then pivoted to their final vertical position in the detector hall. Nearly 10,000 kilometers of wave-shifting fiber will be threaded through the 368,000 individual tubes, and finally the detector will be filled with 3,200,000 gallons of mineral oil loaded with scintillator.