The KATRIN experiment is designed to measure the mass of the electron neutino. Its centerpiece is a huge spectrometer tank that was manufactured a couple of hundred miles from its destination in another part of Southern Germany.
Because of its size, however, the tank took one of the most bizarre detours in the history of detours since local canals and highways did not allow direct transportation.
The tank traveled over 6000 miles by land and sea, through Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Romania, across the Black Sea, past Turkey and rounding Greece and around Sicily, along the coast of North Africa, through the Straights of Gibraltar, round Portugal to the Bay of Biscay, up the West coast of France and through the English Channel, landing in Holland and making its way by land again, to Southern Germany. From this photo you can see that it must have stood out, somewhat, along the way.
Super-K is the mother of all water filled neutrino detectors. A truly giant tank, in a Japanese mine, over 100 feet in all directions and filled with 50,000 tons of water, so pure, that divers in it have experienced vertigo. 11,000 photomultiplier tubes line every surface, giving it a spectacular look, as can be seen in this picture, where the tank is half filled and engineers are examining it in a row boat.
Kamland sits underground in a mine in the Japanese Alps. It is designed to detect electron antineutrinos produced by the 50 or so commercial nuclear reactors that surround it.
The mineral oil, photomultiplier covered bubble is of a similar design to other detectors such as Borexino.
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