The Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan, an underground tank that holds 50 million liters of water, captures neutrinos that emanate from a particle accelerator nearly 300 kilometers away....[More]
TANKING IT:
The Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan, an underground tank that holds 50 million liters of water, captures neutrinos that emanate from a particle accelerator nearly 300 kilometers away. When a neutrino hits the detector, it can produce charged particles, whose high speed through the water emits a flash of light, triggering phototubes mounted in the walls of the Super-K tank. The experiment, known as T2K (Tokai to Kamioka), investigates muon neutrinos transforming into electron neutrinos—one aspect of the so-called oscillation process by which neutrinos change particle “flavors.”
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Kamioka Observatory/ICRR (Institute for Cosmic Ray Research)/University of Tokyo
DEEP DOWN:
Buried underground in the inactive Soudan iron mine in Minnesota, the 5,400-metric-ton octagonal MINOS detector picks up neutrinos from Fermilab in Illinois, 735 kilometers away....[More]
DEEP DOWN:
Buried underground in the inactive Soudan iron mine in Minnesota, the 5,400-metric-ton octagonal MINOS detector picks up neutrinos from Fermilab in Illinois, 735 kilometers away. The particles leave Fermilab as a nearly pure beam of muon neutrinos, but most have changed into tau neutrinos by the time they reach the MINOS detector. To the right of the detector is a neutrino-inspired mural by artist Joseph Giannetti.
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Haley Buffman/NSF and Jamie Yang/NSF
FAR OUT:
It doesn’t look like much, but this remote site in northern Minnesota will soon house a 15,000-metric-ton particle detector to register neutrinos from Fermilab, more than 800 kilometers away....[More]
FAR OUT:
It doesn’t look like much, but this remote site in northern Minnesota will soon house a 15,000-metric-ton particle detector to register neutrinos from Fermilab, more than 800 kilometers away. The planned NOvA experiment seeks to explore the rare oscillation of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos over large distances.
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Fermilab, NOνA collaboration
POWER SOURCE:
Particle accelerators are not the only place physicists can tap into a pure, steady stream of neutrinos. Nuclear reactors also emit large quantities of neutrinos, and a number of experiments have set up shop nearby to measure how they propagate....[More]
POWER SOURCE:
Particle accelerators are not the only place physicists can tap into a pure, steady stream of neutrinos. Nuclear reactors also emit large quantities of neutrinos, and a number of experiments have set up shop nearby to measure how they propagate. The Double Chooz experiment in France, above, comprises two detectors: a near detector 400 meters from the reactors and a far detector one kilometer from the power plant. Comparing the number of hits at each detector allows physicists to determine how many have changed flavor between the two distances.
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Like Double Chooz, the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment in China uses near and far detectors to measure the oscillations of neutrinos emanating from a nuclear power plant....[More]
EYES PEELED:
Like Double Chooz, the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment in China uses near and far detectors to measure the oscillations of neutrinos emanating from a nuclear power plant. The photo above shows the photomultiplier tubes within the Daya Bay detectors, which register the collision of a neutrino with the fluid filling the detector cylinder.
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Lawrence Berkeley National Lab/Roy Kaltschmidt, photographer
SPACED OUT:
A truly giant neutrino detector recently began full operation in Antarctica. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory uses a cubic kilometer of ice as its detector material; a network of sensor chains has been embedded in the ice....[More]
SPACED OUT:
A truly giant neutrino detector recently began full operation in Antarctica. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory uses a cubic kilometer of ice as its detector material; a network of sensor chains has been embedded in the ice. The colored dots on the photo above mark the location of a vertical string of sensors. A neutrino interacting with the ice produces a charged particle called a muon that in turn gives off blue light as it traverses the detector. IceCube’s chains of sensors register that light and allow physicists to track the arrival direction of the neutrino.
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Haley Buffman/NSF & Jamie Yang/NSF
ICE FISHING:
To build the IceCube array, workers had to drill deep into the ice, then lower strings of sensors called digital optical modules (DOMs) such as the one pictured above....[More]
ICE FISHING:
To build the IceCube array, workers had to drill deep into the ice, then lower strings of sensors called digital optical modules (DOMs) such as the one pictured above. Each of the 86 sensor strings holds 60 DOMs, which are now frozen into place up to 2.5 kilometers below the surface.
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IceCube Collaboration/NSF
YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
"And their weirdness, if we could explain it, promises to expand our understanding of the physical world." In this context of the "weirdness" of the neutrino, which has a subatomic origin, the label is, in fact, applicable to the whole of quantum mechanics, with "bizarre" and "counterintuitive" thrown in for good measure to complement our understanding of 'modern' quantum mechanics. As the great Enrico Fermi once surmised, "There are two ways of doing calculations in theoretical physics; one way, and this is the way I prefer, is to have a clear physical picture of the process that you are calculating..." [see: A meeting with Enrico Fermi, Freeman Dyson (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Nature 427, 297 (2004)]. In that context,to get a glimpse of that "clear physical picture" of the neutrino, and to make it short here, please be good enough to access (with your Internet Explorer browser): http://www.sittampalam.net/TheNeutrino.htm Thank you all for your time, and to Science for the space, here. Cheers!
Enjoyed the neutrino article in the April issue of the magazine. I just love reading about advances in our understanding of quantum and cosmic physics. I think what makes the field so interesting is that for everything we know (or think we know) there are just as many questions created about what we don’t know. (Not that I really understand any of it, but to me it is really fascinating stuff.) Shortly after reading the neutrino article I came up with a few questions that I hope might get answers or treatments in future articles in Scientific American. (Disclaimer: This list was composed on April 1)
Does the Higgs boson possibly have have a heavier, hard to detect, family member. If so, could it be called the Higgsalino?
And speaking of the HIggs, if the Higgs has a separate anti particle and a Higgs particle collided with an anti Higgs, would the two annihilate each other and cause any surrounding elementary particles to lose their mass?
Could the “spooky action at a distance” effect be explained by a mediating entity known as the entanglon?
Is it possible that the proposed sterile neutrino also comes with an anti particle, the fecund neutrino?
And what about the extra dimensions that are predicted by string theory? What if they have their own particle zoos? If any have analogs in our own familiar dimensions, will the new particles have to be named like their partners but with a superscript attached: Such as the “muon neutrino, superscript 5” (for the m-neutrino member of the 5th dimension)?
It has been proposed that WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) might be one of the constituents of dark matter. I don’t think the theorists agree on how massive these particles might be. So is it possible that the cosmic body that recently exploded over Russia was not a meteor but actually a single WIMP?
Last question: Axions, monopoles, squarks, etc, etc. Do you have any medications to keep my head from spinning?
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2 Comments
Add Comment"And their weirdness, if we could explain it, promises to expand our understanding of the physical world."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn this context of the "weirdness" of the neutrino, which has a subatomic origin, the label is, in fact, applicable to the whole of quantum mechanics, with "bizarre" and "counterintuitive" thrown in for good measure to complement our understanding of 'modern' quantum mechanics.
As the great Enrico Fermi once surmised, "There are two ways of doing calculations in theoretical physics; one way, and this is the way I prefer, is to have a clear physical picture of the process that you are calculating..." [see: A meeting with Enrico Fermi, Freeman Dyson (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Nature 427, 297 (2004)].
In that context,to get a glimpse of that "clear physical picture" of the neutrino, and to make it short here, please be good enough to access (with your Internet Explorer browser): http://www.sittampalam.net/TheNeutrino.htm
Thank you all for your time, and to Science for the space, here. Cheers!
www.toe.tv
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnjoyed the neutrino article in the April issue of the magazine. I just love reading about advances in our understanding of quantum and cosmic physics. I think what makes the field so interesting is that for everything we know (or think we know) there are just as many questions created about what we don’t know. (Not that I really understand any of it, but to me it is really fascinating stuff.)
Shortly after reading the neutrino article I came up with a few questions that I hope might get answers or treatments in future articles in Scientific American. (Disclaimer: This list was composed on April 1)
Does the Higgs boson possibly have have a heavier, hard to detect, family member. If so, could it be called the Higgsalino?
And speaking of the HIggs, if the Higgs has a separate anti particle and a Higgs particle collided with an anti Higgs, would the two annihilate each other and cause any surrounding elementary particles to lose their mass?
Could the “spooky action at a distance” effect be explained by a mediating entity known as the entanglon?
Is it possible that the proposed sterile neutrino also comes with an anti particle, the fecund neutrino?
And what about the extra dimensions that are predicted by string theory? What if they
have their own particle zoos? If any have analogs in our own familiar dimensions, will the new particles have to be named like their partners but with a superscript attached: Such as the “muon neutrino, superscript 5” (for the m-neutrino member of the 5th dimension)?
It has been proposed that WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) might be one of the constituents of dark matter. I don’t think the theorists agree on how massive these particles might be. So is it possible that the cosmic body that recently exploded over Russia was not a meteor but actually a single WIMP?
Last question: Axions, monopoles, squarks, etc, etc. Do you have any medications to keep my head from spinning?