Establishment of a new HEP/SS facility for construction of large HEP and SS projects.

MSSL is a heavily PPARC supported UCL facilty. There are presently around 50 very highly skilled engineering and technical staff supported by PPARC along with well equipped labs and workshops. The overlap in skills required between Particle Physics (PP) and Space Science (SS) engineering and technical staff is almost total. With the addition of some more lab space, identified below, a particle physics hardware group could be established at MSSL with access to these technical resources, allowing an immediate improvement in the UCL PP facilities. It is expected that an investment like this will benefit the UK through the creation of a unique facility, exploiting the synergies between Space Science and Particle Physics that will allow us to take on projects not presently possible. In addition it will give the PP technical staff at UCL the advantage of supervision and training, which has been lacking with the absence of qualified people to take on these responsibilities. The immeadiate plans for this new facility would be to expand our R&D programme for the Super NEMO project. This project is expected to cost about £20m and construction is expected to start around 2007, assuming all necessary approvals. The UCL group plans to take on a large part of the construction of this experiment, and this construction would take place in the new facility. The Super-Nemo is a next generation double beta decay experiment. The field of neutrino physics has turned up one of the biggest surprises in the last few decades: that neutrinos are not massless. Conservative estimates show that the mass of the neutrinos is in the range of about 50meV. The oscillation experiments cannot say anything about the fundamental type of the neutrino: whether it is Majorana or Dirac. This can only be answered by the positive identification of neutrinoless double beta decay in the case that the neutrinos are of Majorana type (particle and antiparticle are the same) and Super-NEMO will be sensitive at this mass level. UCL has committed to funding the building of this new facility. The PPARC contribution will be focussed on commissioning it to a level where it is fit for the purpose described above. We have prioritised the required work and equipment below. The first priority is funding (150K over three years) for a lab manager who can oversee the equipping of the lab in the first instance and ensure that the facility becomes useful as soon as possible. The second priority is for a physicist/mechanical engineer (£100k over a two year period) with particle physics technical expertise and the right experience to ensure that the infrastructure of the new facility iswell matched to the projects that will come under consideration. The next priority is a contribution to specialist lab infrastructure, aimed specifically at large Particle Physics projects.