The Minos Far Detector Construction and Quality Assurance Testing

The MINOS experiment will study neutrino oscillations using the Fermilab Main Injector neutrino beam and both near and far detectors. The detectors are fine-grained sampling calorimeters with 1 inch thick steel absorbers with scintillator as the sampling elements. The scintillator planes are segmented in 4 cm wide strips for tracking and event topology measurements. The very large size of the far detector (26,000m² of scintillator) requires that the cost per unit of detector be kept low. A combination of extruded solid scintillator, wavelength-shifting fibers, multi-pixel PMTs and low-cost electronics meets this challenge. In this talk some important details of the system design will be discussed along with test results from fabrication and initial performance of the first 100 installed far detector planes.