Search for neutrino oscillations in a long baseline experiment at the CHOOZ nuclear reactors

Since neutrinos interact so weakly with matter, most of their basic properties are still largely unknown. One of the most important issues to be settled concerns their rest mass. We have no idea why neutrinos are so much lighter than their charged lepton partners; no fundamental symmetry in nature requires massless neutrinos. Massive neutrinos are demanded to explain the anomalous counting rate of experiments measuring the solar and the atmospheric neutrino fluxes. The discrepancy between experimental data and theoretical predictions can be accounted for in terms of neutrino oscillations, which would take place only in the case of massive neutrinos. The subject of this thesis is the search for neutrino oscillations in CHOOZ, the first long baseline experiment to explore a neutrino mass region where hints at neutrino oscillations came from the atmospheric neutrino anomaly.