The purpose of this paper is to review the experimental apparatus and some physics results from the NOMAD (neutrino oscillation magnetic detector) experiment which took data in the CERN wide-band neutrino beam from 1995 to 1998. It collected and reconstructed more than one million charged current (CC) events with an accuracy which was previously obtained only with bubble chambers. The main aim of the experiment was to search for the oscillation into , in a region of mass compatible with the prescriptions of the hot dark matter hypothesis, which predicted a mass in the range of 1–10？eV/c2. This was done by searching for CC interactions, observing the production of the lepton through its various decay modes by using kinematical criteria. In parallel, NOMAD also strongly contributed to the study of more conventional processes: quasielastic events, strangeness production and charm dimuon production, single photon production, and coherent neutral pion production. Exotic searches were also investigated. The paper reviews the neutrino beam, the detector setup, the detector performances, the neutrino oscillation results, the strangeness production, the dimuon charm production, and summarizes other pieces of research. 1. Motivation When it was proposed, the experiment was motivated by theoretical arguments suggesting that the may have a mass of 1？eV/c2 or higher, and therefore could be the main constituent of the dark matter in the Universe. This suggestion was based on two assumptions:(i)the interpretation of the solar deficit in terms of oscillations, amplified by matter effects inside the Sun, giving ？eV2/c4;(ii)the so-called “see-saw” mechanism which predicted that neutrino masses are proportional to the square of the mass of the charged lepton or the charge 2/3 quark of the same family. Furthermore, in analogy with quark mixing, neutrino mixing angles were expected to be small. This defined the region to search for the corresponding oscillation. To fulfill this program, the NOMAD detector measured and identified most of the particles, charged and neutral, produced in neutrino interactions. The active target was a set of drift chambers with a fiducial mass of about 2.7 tons and a low average density (99？kg/m3) comparable to liquid hydrogen. The detector was located in a dipole magnet, formerly used by the UA1 experiment, giving a field of 0.4？T. This allowed a determination of the momenta of charged particles via their curvature, with minimal degradation due to multiple scattering. The active target was followed by a transition radiation detector to identify
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