Neutrino experiments

[Drone]

IceCube is a wonderful and unique astrophysical telescope - it is deployed deep in the Antarctic ice but looks over the entire universe, detecting neutrinos coming through the Earth from the northern skies, as well as from around the southern skies. IceCube is comprised of 5160 digital optical modules suspended along 86 strings embedded in a cubic kilometer of ice beneath the South Pole. The National Science Foundation-supported observatory detects neutrinos through the tiny flashes of blue light, called Cherenkov light, produced when neutrinos interact in the ice.

Today, nearly 25 years after the pioneering idea of detecting neutrinos in ice, the IceCube Collaboration announces the observation of 28 very high-energy particle events that constitute the first solid evidence for astrophysical neutrinos from cosmic accelerators.

The 28 high-energy neutrinos were found in data collected by the IceCube detector from May 2010 to May 2012 and analyzed for neutrino events exceeding 50 TeV coming from anywhere in the sky.

It's the highest energy neutrino ever observed, with an estimated energy of 1.14 PeV. These events constitute the first solid evidence for astrophysical neutrinos from cosmic accelerators.

 

[Drone]

NOvA is the next generation neutrino experiment.

I just love neutrinos - the most abundant, curious, and elusive critters in particle physics. This project looks so promising.

The 50-foot (15 m) tall detector blocks are filled with a liquid scintillator that’s made of 95% mineral oil and 5% liquid hydrocarbon called pseudocumene, which is toxic but “imperative to the neutrino-detecting process.” The mixture magnifies any light that hits it, allowing the neutrino strikes to be more easily detected and measured.

Once the experiment is fully operational scientists expect to catch a precious few neutrinos every day ~ 5000 total over the course of its six-year run.

The goal of the NOvA experiment is to successfully capture and measure the masses of the different neutrino flavors and also determine if neutrinos are their own antiparticles.

Look at the size of this thing!

After completion this summer NOvA’s near and far detectors will weigh 300 and 14000 tons, respectively.

 

[HammerON]

Cool stuff
Thanks for sharing.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Once the experiment is fully operational scientists expect to catch a precious few neutrinos every day ~ 5000 total over the course of its six-year run.

I wonder if there's a connection between neutrinos and cancer.

 

[Steevo]

I wonder if there's a connection between neutrinos and cancer.

Anything over a few MeV is capable of damaging DNA, however the real question is what are you going to do about it? Particles of this size can fly all the way through the earth and then finally interact with an atom in the ice, unless you ware willing to sit at the bottom of a very thick lead lined well for your life.......

 

[McSteel]

I'm not sure I'd call these telescopes, as their resolution, integration time and precision are all way below what's required to get a meaningful picture of anything in even a year, let alone a couple of days or weeks... They're very slow and imprecise detectors at best. That being said, it'll be interesting to find out how many high-energy mu- and tau-neutrinos can reach us. Also, I wonder if we will detect any right-chirality neutrinos, and if they will have a large Majorana mass if we do... Guess it's a waiting game now.

I wonder if there's a connection between neutrinos and cancer.

There's a connection between anything capable of causing direct cellular damage at the structural level while leaving the cell capable of mitosis and cancer. Why not neutrinos as well? Granted, their interaction radius is of the order of 10^-44 m, so it must be an extremely rare occurrence, but possible nonetheless.

 

[Drone]

Granted, their interaction radius is of the order of 10^-44 m

Ahahaha where on Earth did you get that number from? Even Planck length is longer

 

[BiggieShady]

Ahahaha where on Earth did you get that number from? Even Planck length is longer

Yeah, more like 2 × 10 ^ −23 meters, the effective cross-section radius of 1 MeV neutrinos as measured by Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines in 1950-ies

Their result was presented as cross section area in squared cm, hence the exponent of -44

 

[McSteel]

And I did mean square meters, but my brain decided to fart instead.

 

[Drone]

Exciting news!

IceCube detected three astrophysical neutrinos that could have radiated from titanic explosions in the depths of space.

Such interactions are so infrequent that IceCube researchers had to search for two years to find these three high-energy neutrinos.

A belowground experiment at the South Pole has now discovered three of the highest-energy neutrinos ever found, particles that may be created in the most violent explosions of the universe. These neutrinos all have energies at the absurdly high scale of petaelectronvolts - roughly the energy equivalent of one million times a proton’s mass.

That's so cool!

These neutrinos are valuable because they are extremely standoffish, rarely ever interacting with other particles, and are uncharged, so their direction is never swayed by magnetic fields in the universe. Thus, their trajectories should point straight back to their source, which astronomers think could be a variety of intense events such as humongous black holes accreting matter, explosions called gamma-ray bursts or galaxies forming stars at furious rates.

Source

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Has anyone been able to figure out how fast they move yet? Detecting one is difficult, I imagine detecting the same one twice to get a velocity is near impossible.

I heard recently that they're the only known object that can travel faster than the speed of light but Wikipedia tends to disagree:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurements_of_neutrino_speed

 

[Drone]

Has anyone been able to figure out how fast they move yet? Detecting one is difficult, I imagine detecting the same one twice to get a velocity is near impossible.

I heard recently that they're the only known object that can travel faster than the speed of light

That's bullcrap. Speed of light (its average value anyway) is a cosmological limit (as a function of space and time). Only light itself can travel slightly faster than 299792458 m/s. Here's what Richard Feynman says about this:

/snip
..... an amplitude for light can go faster (or slower) than the conventional speed of light. Light doesn't go only in straight lines nor does it always go only at the speed of light! It may surprise you that there is an amplitude for a photon to go at speeds faster or slower than the conventional speed, which is called c. The amplitudes for these possibilities are very small compared to the contribution from speed c; in fact, they cancel out when light travels over long distances.

/snip

In a nutshell: light travels with variable speed and not in straight lines. It can go slower or faster than c but all those vectors cancel each other out and in the end you get average value which is conventional speed of light aka c.

Even gravity itself can't travel faster than light. Neutrino has mass it means it's slower than light, it can get accelerated to 99. .... % of c though.
However unlike light neutrino can't be affected by magnetic field, in that sense neutrino has more freedom than light.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I didn't know that photons were variable and c is merely an average. You're post also invoked me doing a second Google search which pulled a second Wiki article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly

The initial finding that may have indicated neutrinos moving faster than light was due to a loose fiber optic connection.

 

[Drone]

I didn't know that photons were variable and c is merely an average. You're post also invoked me doing a second Google search which pulled a second Wiki article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly

The initial finding that may have indicated neutrinos moving faster than light was due to a loose fiber optic connection.

Lol of course and also their gps was faulty or something like that. Only space-time and light can move faster than c because they are both "not of this world" if you see what I mean

 

[FordGT90Concept]

What about qubits or quantum mechanics in general? I wouldn't write off the possibility...yet.

 

[Drone]

What about qubits or quantum mechanics in general? I wouldn't write off the possibility...yet.

Quantum mechanics and general relativity have theories about shortcuts like "wormholes", "entanglement" and "spooky action at a distance". They all have some interesting concepts where information can get from one point to another faster than possible. They don't violate principles they just make total route shorter, that's why exceeding the speed of light is not required.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Another one is electrons. When they change the shelf they are on, they emit photons. The rate at which they change shelves could exceed c too.

 

[Drone]

It's uncertainty principle. Electron's position isn't exact but probable. At any given time electron around the atom's nucleus can appear at any time and any place in the Universe. It's called one-electron universe postulated by Richard Feynman:

there exists only a single electron in the universe, propagating through space and time in such a way as to appear in many places simultaneously

Links:

1

2

3


I can easily imagine this because all electrons in the Universe are absolutely identical

 

[FordGT90Concept]

That's crazy if true. There's billions of billions of billions of billions of electrons in everyone of us.

 

[Drone]

Researchers established a range (0.3-0.9 eV) for the upper limit on the mass of the neutrino.

The main goal of the NEMO (Neutrino Ettore Majorana Observatory) experiment was to detect an extremely rare signal, double-beta decay, which is normally hidden by stray radiation and natural radioactivity. To protect it from this background radiation, the NEMO-3 detector was set up under around 2km of rock, in the Fréjus road tunnel, and built using materials with very low radioactivity. As a result, total radioactivity levels inside the dectector are 10 million times weaker than natural radioactivity.

Another characteristic that makes the NEMO instrument unique is its ability to identify the particles emitted in double-beta decay while at the same time using calorimeters to measure their energy. The quality of the data obtained thanks to these technologies opens the way for SuperNEMO, a detector that will be 100 times as sensitive and may be able to detect neutrinoless double-beta decay. With this future instrument, expected to be up and running in 2018, the scientists hope to usher in a new physics that goes beyond the Standard Model.

 

[Drone]

This is revolutionary stuff:

Neutrinos forged in the heart of the sun have been detected for the first time

Neutrinos are hallmarks of the dominant fusion process inside the sun. Created in the first step of a reaction sequence responsible for the majority of the sun's fusion, the particles have long eluded detection. Now, an international collaboration of more than 100 scientists has made the first measurements of these elusive particles.

Source

The Borexino detector (haha, looks so unreal)

 

[Drone]

IceCube scientists say that maybe some neutrinos can travel faster than light. To be exact these ftl neutrinos exceed light speed by only about 5 parts in a billion trillion. They describe it by 'bump-cutoff' exotic mechanism. They were able to place strong limits on how much faster than light any superluminal neutrinos can be.

Read the article it's interesting. It's amazing that neutrinos can be so energetic. Big Bird event had energies of about 2 quadrillion electron volts (PeV). "That's about the energy needed to lift a roll of postage stamps a foot off the ground, yet it's contained in a subatomic particle with the smallest mass known."

The IceCube Laboratory at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica, sits atop a cubic kilometer of clear ice instrumented with thousands of sensors designed to catch flashes of light from neutrino interactions.

Nuclear fuel glows blue in a submerged reactor core. The light, called Cerenkov radiation, arises from high-energy electrons that are moving faster than light can travel through the water. Similarly, IceCube detects flashes of Cerenkov light when neutrinos interact within the detector and produce charged particles that move through the ice faster than light does.

An unrelated but very interesting article:

Light goes infinitely fast with new on-chip material

 

[blobster21]

Great thread. I have never heard about that one-electron universe previously ! gigantic numbers are the best !

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Truly remarkable stuff. nice one @Drone

I want the guys job who sits there waiting for them.

 

[Drone]

The planned Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) will require 70 000 tons of liquid argon, making it the largest experiment of its kind.

Before building this unprecedented machine, scientists understandably want to make sure it's going to work. That's why members of the international DUNE collaboration recently began taking data using a test version of their detector.

“How can we be confident that what we want to do for DUNE is going to work?” says Michelle Stancari, co-coordinator of the DUNE prototype. “That's where the 35-ton comes in.”

​

The DUNE 35-ton prototype is a test version of the future DUNE detector.

Look at the wires! So damn sexy!