Latest Developments in Nuclear Emulsion Technology

Nuclear emulsion is high sensitive photographic film used for detection of three-dimensional trajectory of charged particles. These trajectories are recorded as tracks consist of a lot of silver grains. The size of silver grain is about 1 μm, so that nuclear emulsion has submicron three-dimensional spatial resolution, which gives us a few mrad three-dimensional angular resolution. The important technical progress was speed-up of the read-out technique of nuclear emulsions built with optical microscope system. We succeeded in developing a high-speed three-dimensional read-out system named Super Ultra Track Selector (S-UTS) with the operating read-out speed of approximately 50 cm2/h. Nowadays we are developing the nuclear emulsion gel independently in Nagoya University by introducing emulsion gel production machine. Moreover, we are developing nuclear emulsion production technologies (gel production, poring and mass production). In this paper, development of nuclear emulsion technologies for the OPERA experiment, applications by the technologies and current development are described.