The ICARUS liquid argon time projection chamber

Abstract Years of R&D allowed the overcoming of the main technological problems in the establishment of the ICARUS technology. A major step of the ICARUS scientific program has been the construction and testing of a 10 m 3 prototype, which paved the way for the installation of the first 600 t ICARUS module. We present a summary of the basic principles of the ICARUS technique and some of the events collected exposing the 10 m 3 module to cosmic rays at LNGS, from February to May 2000.