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There is a vast amount of quality information on the internet, even if it falls short of all information. Did you want lecture notes from a QFT class introducing Majorana particles, or an introduction talk on their relevance to condensed matter research, or a review paper covering research, or how about the previous papers (e,g. this one) from the very same author of the paper in the news here? Many of her previous papers are already available for free on ArXiV, and this one might be too. Sometimes there is a bit of delay with posting things there after they get published, but a huge amount of published papers on various physics topics are available for free, either there or on researcher's home pages.

Making something available is not the same as giving people the will to bother even looking for it, let alone actually reading and pursuing such topics. But if so motivated, there is much more easy to find introductory information now on the internet than in the library when I was in grad school, at the least due to numerous lecture notes available that would never have been available in the past because it took too much time to formalize things into an actual book. Plus now you can search if much faster, and even if a paywalled version is found, it takes literally ten seconds to find free versions for many papers.

http://wipkip.nikhef.nl/events/

Index of /events/

Icon Name Last modified Size Description Parent Directory
          BoostCon/ 09 May 2012 19:13
          CCC/ 04 Jan 2013 01:33
          CONFidence/ 12 May 2012 02:49
          defcon/ 12 May 2012 06:11
          derbycon/ 12 May 2012 06:13
          Documentaries/ 12 May 2012 02:51
          echtehackers/ 12 May 2012 06:18
          emfcamp/ 07 Sep 2012 00:08
          eth 0/ 12 May 2012 06:20
          FIRST/ 12 May 2012 02:52
          FOSDEM/ 12 May 2012 03:42
          FroSCon/ 12 May 2012 04:25
          GoingNative/ 12 May 2012 04:33
          HAL/ 12 May 2012 04:42
          HAR/ 12 May 2012 05:01
          HitB/ 12 May 2012 05:12
          hitr2ndb/ 19 Sep 2012 13:01
          hollandopen/ 12 May 2012 06:25
          HOPE/ 12 May 2012 05:01
          OHM/ 23 Sep 2013 00:30
          overig/ 12 May 2012 06:26
          ph neutral/ 12 May 2012 06:52
          rehash/ 12 May 2012 06:56
          rpi/ 12 May 2012 06:56
          securitytube/ 12 May 2012 06:58
          shmoocon/ 17 Mar 2013 23:35
          WTH/ 12 May 2012 05:41

http://wipkip.nikhef.nl/events/

Index of /events/

Icon Name Last modified Size Description Parent ectory
  BoostCon/ 09May2012 19:13
  CCC/ 04Jan2013 01:33
  CONFidence/ 12May2012 02:49
  defcon/ 12May2012 06:11
  derbycon/ 12May2012 06:13
  Documentaries/ 12May2012 02:51
  echtehackers/ 12May2012 06:18
  emfcamp/ 07Sep2012 00:08
  eth0/ 12May2012 06:20
  FIRST/ 12May2012 02:52
  FOSDEM/ 12May2012 03:42
  FroSCon/ 12May2012 04:25
  GoingNative/ 12May2012 04:33
  HAL/ 12May2012 04:42
  HAR/ 12May2012 05:01
  HitB/ 12May2012 05:12
  hitr2ndb/ 19Sep2012 13:01
  hollandopen/ 12May2012 06:25
  HOPE/ 12May2012 05:01
  OHM/ 23Sep2013 00:30
  overig/ 12May2012 06:26
  phneutral/ 12May2012 06:52
  rehash/ 12May2012 06:56
  rpi/ 12May2012 06:56
  securitytube/ 12May2012 06:58
  shmoocon/ 17Mar2013 23:35
  WTH/ 12May2012 05:41

http://wipkip.nikhef.nl/events/

like this or like this or like this or with this if you want to go low tech (light has no charge and is smaller than a proton).

Okay sorry for the flippant answer, basically in particle physics, protons are huge, very large (but not massive) objects. Finding something smaller than them is pretty easy because size doesnt matter. What matters is the strength of its interaction with the rest of the universe. So we find small objects via their interactions with other objects which we can detect in our detectors. No charge makes things a little more tricky but objects can also carry colour charge and weak isospin and thats how we would find an electrically neutral object. Neutrinos, the hardest particles to detector only interact via the weak force and they are almost impossible to see but we do detect them. Also we can detect things like neutrinos by the absence of things, they carry away energy from the collision and we can detect that theres not all the energy there should be.

Not C++ but C: f2c

Hi,

Neutrinos interact with matter only through the weak nuclear force (and probably the gravitational force; whether they have mass or not is still kind of open, although it seems increasingly more likely that they have a non-zero mass). You are correct that the neutrino reaction does not directly produce a gamma ray photon.

The collision of a neutrino with a chlorine atom changes one of the chlorine atom's neutrons into a proton (note: a weak nuclear reaction), thus transforming the Chlorine atom to an Argon atom (atomic numbers 17 and 18, respectively). The reaction also produces an electron (charge must be conserved).

The particular isotope of argon produced (Ar-37) is unstable to radioactive decay. In a few days it spontaneously reverts back to Chlorine-37, producing an anti-electron in the process:

Ar(37) -> Cl(37) + neutrino + e(+)

The anti-electron immediately finds its way to the nearest electron, and they annihilate, producing a pair of gamma rays, which lead to a cascade of optical photons, which are detected by the experiment.

Whew.

Note that Super-K (the Japanese experiment that was damaged recently) doesn't actually use this chlorine setup, it uses something similar using ultra-pure water as the reactant. Also, I believe the water-based detectors rely on the kinetic energy of the electron in the first reaction to produce cerenkov radiation, rather than a subsequent beta decay/annihilation of anti-electron.

Here are some links on neutrino detector experiments. Google has all these and more.

The Solar Neutrino Problem

Review of all experiments

Sudbury Neutrino Observatory uses deuterium (a/k/a heavy water)

Super-Kamiokande

AMANDA uses Antarctic Ice as the reactant.

I recommend the first link for a detailed overview of solar neutrinos.

enjoy,
Jason

The Key Role of Impurities in Ancient Damascus Steel Blades

We are considering e-mailing every registred user once a year - e-mail would be used to find out if the address is still OK, and it would give the registred users some info about the status of the counter... I hope one e-mail a year is not too much. WDYT?

I would not mind getting an e-mail, but as long as people haven't asked for it, don't send it. Microsoft is getting flamed for their Y2K spam.
Don't give them the excuse that Linux does it too.

As a (terribly aselect) sample, I looked at registrations from NL::Groningen of people I know, ml.org is down, flits.rug.nl can't accept connections to port 25 (SMTP). Only flits102-126.flits.rug.nl can accept e-mail and you would wake a bot there. However all the people I checked with *.ml.org or flits10?-*.flits.rug.nl addresses still use Linux.

Please look at vrfy first.