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SuperK Neutrino Detector Severely Damaged.
Eric Sharkey writes "The Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector, which announced the discovery of neutrino oscillation and mass in 1998 (covered by Slashdot at the time), has been severely damaged. The NY Times (free reg, blah blah) has an article here. Most of the phototubes have been destroyed. Repair estimates top $30M, leaving the world far less capable of observing the next supernova neutrino burst, should it arrive before repairs or a replacement could be completed." CD: I called the lead of the project and he was in the tank checking out the damage. The webpage for the Super-Kamiokande is here. There are pictures for you to peruse.
Of course this is just wild speculation, but...
A couple of Japanese colleges say that SuperK was previously being targeted for budget cuts, and was fighting to maintain funding. They were concerned that if it would indeed take tens of millions of USDs to fix, then it may be cut. That would be a real dissappiontment.
Let's hope SuperK comes back on line, and that we don't have a galactic supernova go off while SuperK is being fixed.
Seems strange that the article was so sketchy on why the damage was done. They sort of implied that the tank got overfilled, but then again they really avoided saying anything.
Why would a research instution hide the reason for the damage, afraid that they are going to cripple someone's career? It certainly is a tragedy, but the fact that they are not disclosing the real reason for the damage makes it more interesting somehow.
Thumbs up for cool Neutrino detectors though, it has been an unexplained scientific phenomena for a long time now. I hope they can fix it (and have the $$ too).
Brett
__ No registration required to read this message. They did it in the Matrix.
I don't claim to be a physicist, but I do have a passing knowledge of the subject and a huge interest in just what those little buggers do. This is very unfortunate, and I wish the team the best of luck in getting things back in working order.
Godzilla? FLEE! FLEE!
I knew that they were filling the tanks for more data collection. I guess it's good my friend already has the data she needs to write her senior thesis.
While the accident is a tragic blow to some valid and interesting research, no one should lose any sleep over the possibility of being unable to analyze the next big supernova before it can be repaired. After all, supernovae on the scale of SN1987A occur once every few hundred years (the last two occurred in 1054 and 1572.) I suspect repairing Super-K will take significantly faster than that.
Even in the minuscule chance that a big supernova will occur in the meantime, Super-K isn't the only neutrino observatory around. The Sudsbury Neutrino Observatory, a similar experiment, is online and producing some very good results.
They should have used a surge protector, not just a power strip. Too late now!
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
(shamelessly borrowed from Slashdot Japan)
The website is gone now. 7000 tubes broken and now their website kicked in the pants - makes sure that the whole facility is offline.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
One of my colleagues used to work at Fermi Lab and he mentioned once that the light sensors that were damaged are extremely sensitive to saline solutions (such as water that has any appreciable amount of non-neutral-pH molecules). His speculation was that the deionized water that they were using had developed impurities in it, possibly from rusting pipes or failed filters, and those impurities set off the chain reaction in question.
Naturally this is all speculation, but it sounded plausible to me. Does anyone with a stronger chemistry background than mine know if this is a likely cause?
-sting3r
...have no charge and no mass... are very fast and pass through the planet so fast most detection has to be done underground... Damn I watch too much public TV...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Allrighty, step right up and pick the punchline that best matches this story:
#1: These photos are fake!! Theyre from the inside of Studio 54!! Look up in the balcony in the 4th image, you can see Liza Minelli smokin a bong!
#2: It should be easy to build another Super K detector. Just look for trailer parks...Super K's tend to spring up in low-income areas where Wal-Mart hasn't already established a commercial presence..
#3: So SuperK is handicapped...Does that make it "Special K" ?
hee hee
Bowie J. Poag
I watched on TV (Discovery I think) sometime ago where they were doing something similar with pure water in Canada. Basically they were using an abandoned mine shaft to trap these particles and the bottom was lined with pure water...or something like that..
1,800 Japanese Grad students are looking for a new advisor, citing "extended duration of research project" as the reason. Each potential particle-physicist has a co-authorship of several papers, all shared with the other 1,799 students and their advisors. It is expected that many will go into theory soon, as the resulting projects can be finished this decade. One student was overheard saying "first I was put as 234th author on our last paper, and now the experiment is gone. I've had it, I'm going into astronomy, man! Or maybe condensed matter theory, but not this! Not anymore!"
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
Nov 12, 2050,
Scientists working with Japan's Super-Duper-Kamiokande anounce that they have lost containment on a micro black hole.
Apparently, an undergrad triped over the power cable.
Officials tell us that there is no need to panic. The mini black hole plunged straight to the center of the earth.
Happily, it will feed on the other mini black hole that was created when the first copy of Windows 2047 was burned onto CD and collapsed on its own data mass -- it was thought at the time that the universe was acting to protect both itself and the second law of Thermodynamics from Windows 2047's immense entropic mass.
There is some speculation that the black hole could actually provide enough energy to run Windows 2047, but Physicists are highly dubious.
The apocalypse is near, and chrisd is it's harbinger. Calling the place the story is about is a dead giveaway. A real slashdot editor would never do that.
There's no such lab in Canada. In fact, the only things in Canada are polar bears, snow, and alcoholics.
Premature at best.
It's a real shame, the loss the Japan lab, but I can't help but think that the lab being built in Western South Dakota will be even more important. I cannot find a decent date on completion, but this page explains a newer, better neutrino detection lab being constructed right now.
The location even better (8,000 feet deep, insulated from nearly every form of interference) and the site has fanstastic support from the state and federal government. The Japan lab isn't the only one in existance -- there are others in Ontario and the South Dakota lab has had facilities in operation since 1967.
The articles, both the Slashdot commentary and the NYTimes article, predict a savage demise. But other labs, especially the South Dakota lab, offer a huge potential to pickup the slack.
No sig is worth reading.
Bakhrubabad, Afghanistan - Speaking from his hidden mountain stronghold, Osama bin Laden praised the destruction of the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector Tuesday. The terrorist leader said neutrinos are "...an abomination on the face of God," and termed the search for neutrinos "...idolatry, which will be smashed beneath the fist of righteousness." Bin Laden, who once called neutrinos "little messengers of Allah" abruptly reversed his stand upon learning that a steady stream of neutrinos was constantly penetrating every cell in his body. He now vows "not to rest until the last neutrino has been obliterated from the face of the earth."
does any one know hen the next supernova is estimated. Hopefully not for a year..until the superk is restored. Technology has been put back by a year
Check out the photo album; clearly their costume designer has been influenced by the Beastie Boys video few years back. :)
It means a diversion of news coverage for 15 seconds to report on the nips instead of reporting on "American Fights Back".
But that is all. Nothing more.
The FBI is warning again that a supernova may explode and send a massive number of energetic neutrinos toward U.S. interests worldwide, possibly this week, and that the world's neutrino telescopes should be on the highest alert.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said the warning -- the second this month -- was based on credible information, described by others as coming from sources outside the solar system. The information did not specify the type of supernova or whether the progenitor star would have a binary companion, Ashcroft said.
Ashcroft tried to walk a fine line between giving the public prompt and necessary warnings and not causing panic.
The alert "gives people a basis for continuing to live their lives the way they would otherwise live them, with this elevated sense of alertness or vigilance that comes from knowing that the planet could be vaporized any second," Ashcroft told a news conference.
FBI Director Robert Mueller said the previous supernova warning may have helped avert an explosion. Ashcroft said the absence of a supernova should not lull people "into a false sense of indifference."
"It's important for the American people to understand that these (alerts) are to be taken seriously," said Ashcroft, who canceled plans to travel Monday to Toronto to address a conference of near-earth asteroid experts.
Officials said the warning was based in part on intelligence that terrorists may set off a supernova within 1000 light years of the earth, in the aftermath of the Afghan bombings by U.S. and British forces.
"There certainly is intelligence that causes you to be concerned, and possibly that al-Qaida may be behind it," said one senior U.S. official, speaking only on condition of anonymity.
Ashcroft said that all neutrino observatories were advised to go on the highest alert. Federal agencies, meanwhile, were increasing security and authorities were boosting their efforts to keep suspected neutrinos from entering U.S. airspace- either by coming down from above or by emerging from the ground after a trip through the center of the earth.
Right, pressure: a bulb imploding under a significant depth of water (say, at the bottom of the tank, I doubt it is artificially pressurised in any way, the volume would be too large for that to be an economically feasible structure) will create a shockwave within the water - which may have enough energy in turn to cause a neighbouring bulb to implode, etc, etc, bringing about a cascade failure of the bulbs.
Which is why deep water divers have to be carefull with their lights while working under pressure - if one implodes, the shockwave is like a small bomb going off. Remember, water is much more dense than air, any shockwaves will have significantly more energy, particularly at a depth of 40 meters.
All it would take is for one bulb to be broken somewhere in the depths of the tank (through physical impact or corrosion, etc) to set off a large number of them. Despite it's size, these are delicate instruments.
Just a rational, educated guess.
"Thank goodness we got our Nobel already cooking," he said.
Am I the only one who finds this distasteful? I that what's really important here???
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
If this thing costs $30 million to fix, don'tcha think someone should have it insured against everything? Poor planning.
*trenton
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
I don't know how much their missions overlap, but does this put any more urgency on getting the Ice Cube neutrino scope up and running?
Whilst I'm here, I've been mulling over some possible reasons for the accident:
the school i'm at (UBC) is co-sponsoring a neutrino detector in sudbury: http://www.physics.ubc.ca/~kutter/
But wouldn't they have insurance for something like this?
I told them not to overclock the AthlonXP 1900 in that baby, no matter what toms hardware says!
Pardon my lack of scientific knowledge and enthusiam, but what exactly will finding one of these suckers do or, besides cost a ton of cash?
How will knowing they're out there and finding one will benefit people, besides in the science for science's sake sort of reasoning (not that I'm automatically opposed to that).
Alas gallinaceas de urbe bovis volo
Bill: "I'm Bill S. Preston, Esquire."
Ted: "And I'm Ted "Theodore" Logan."
Bill, Ted: "And together, we're WYLD PHYSICISTS!"
Bill: "Ok, the maintenance dudes are done. I'm gonna refill the water tank."
<cacophony of pops as the light detectors implode>
Ted: "Strange things are afoot at the Super-K."
Rufus: [reassuringly to the camera]: "They do get better."
~Philly
It serves them right for adding that big red "SELF DESTRUCT" button. Of course, it didn't help that the Mad Scientist (er, Project Director) just stood there boasting about taking over the world instead of firing the dang thing.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
When RIAA sued Napster, Gnutella argued invincibility because it was decentralized, and derived no benefit from the file swapping. They were playing a game of chicken when they activated central servers at all. Now, they are adding ads to the software, meaning that they gain a direct monetary benefit from the file swapping. My prediction is that we'll hear about a RIAA Limewire suit before December.
BlackGriffen
Or some other event that we have never seen
yet (be cause it happens sooooo very rarely)
might occur.
Can we really say we know, yet, enough
about what is really going on in space?
I find the lack of attention to scepticism
to be a troubling reminder that
every major discovery in physics always
leaves most physicists dumbfounded.
And then they shut up for a few years
because they suddenly realize that they
haven't been doing science at all, but
just getting funded and posing.
Neutrino observatories ARE there to catch supernovae, although this is not their primary reason for existance.
SNO is indeed on the case for supernovae explosions, but the fact of the matter is that one observatory simply isn't enough; because of unvavoidable detector downtimes (maintanence, calibration, equipment failures, instrumental problems, etc etc) you can't run 24/7/365 with these guys. Also important is that one really wants both detectors live: you want verification that there really IS a supernova in progress before you swing the Hubble around to look for it.
Add to that the complimentary advantages of the detectors (angular resolution and high statistics in SK, antineutrino detection and energy resolution in SNO) and you really really don't want SK going down if you're a neutrino astrophysicsist interested in supernovae.
--Nathaniel, recent PhD with SNO
This sounds suspiciously like the plot of Half-Life.
m00.
This thing collapsed just hours ago. Remember that work was being done in an underground lab. There are probably no more than 2 dozen people on site (a remote part of Japan) at one time, and they just had their detector implode. Give them some time to figure out what's going on down there. Heck, they might not really understand it for a few weeks. Science is like that.
The chain-reaction-implosion mechanism is a plausable one, but it still requires something to make it happen.. these tubes have been sitting under a lot of hydrostatic pressure (more than during the accident) for years now. Other phototube experiments have been doing similar things, none of which have ever seen this happen.
The failure mode for the tubes is likely to be leackage at the base (the back) which slowly degrades the vacuum inside... no implosion.
There was likely a large pressure change that happened all at once. I'd be looking for a rockburst: a small seizmic event in which the external rock pressure (which is very large) caused the wall to buckle and throw debris.
---Nathaniel, glad it didn't happen to HIS neutrino experiment.
I just saw the video on NHK (Japanese state television) of the interior of the neutrino detector after the "accident".
I dont understand it, it looks like a bomb was set off in it or something. The reporting was very sparse, but the video shows broken glass and electronic bits scattered everywhere in the water, and smashed parts and wires floating in the chamber, like a bomb (or a student going
nuts with a baseball bat in the tank or
something) hit it or something. It is very wierd
type of "accident" if that is what it was...
Any one know what *really* happened here?
It makes no sense..
Next time we had better check that "neutrino safe" box on the detector order form...
The real problem is entropy.
Although news has been sketchy, I am hopeful that they had the phototubes insured. (Any other financial cost will be small compared to the PMTs.) Even if they didn't, I think it's not too unlikely that Japan and the US will re-fund the experiment. SK has done some really amazing work, and is committed to a long-term project with KEK (the K2K long-baseline experiment). I can't imagine that they would simply dump this very productive and valuable resource. But then, who am I to predict the whims of politicians?
However, even if money is no object, timeline could be. These 20-inch PMTs are not exactly off-the-shelf items, and Hamamatsu(the company that provides them for SK and many other experiments around the world) has substantial lead times in getting their production lines up. All told, even under the best of conditions, the process could take 2 years, by which time SK will be in severe competition with a lot of other experiments: Borexino, KamLand, MINOS, etc. etc.
They MIGHT use the time to build super-duper-K.. putting a magnet in the water to look for lepton charge sign from atmospheric neutrinos, but that seems a bit farfetched and difficult.
---Nathaniel, messenger of doom
P.S. I call dibs on the SK linac when it gets scraped!
Oh, I forgot to mention: IceCube (and AMANDA) are not really in the same buisiness as Super-K. The really big ice experiments are looking for cosmogenic neutrinos, and very-high energy atmospheric neutrinos, not the same energy band as SK. SK in addition does a lot of work on solar neutrinos and other physics besides; the ice cube is not really in competition... although it is extremely cool. Not to say cold.
--- Nathaniel
Who has worked in Sudbury (SNO) and Minnesota (MINOS) and wants no part of AMANDA (south pole)
Anyone have a no-reg-req link for nytimes? channel/archive[s]/partners prefix seems not to work. As a matter of principle, I'm not going to register, or use any of the publicly known usernames. Information like that should be free, dammit.
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
form of radiation, right? This happened in water in Japan, right? It must've been Godzilla! 8-)
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
SK water is (was) about as ph balanced as you can get.
SK is/was the far detector for the K2K long baseline neutrino experiment which is/was still running. With out SK, there isn't much point. SK was also planned to be used in another future lbl experiment, JHF-SK, which could pin down some of the mixing parameters (theta_13) and possibly put a limit on CP violation in the neutrino system.
So, this short sighted crass statement by this anonymous physicist really annoys me.
*laugh* Good thing it wasn't the Basterdino's super-sym partner (the Basterdon). Last I heard, it was suspected to mass about as much as a Mastodon (within a factor of Pi times some magic number).
-- Markus
This is midly off-topic, but I'd love to hear an answer if anyone's got one.
Has anything come out of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory? Net resources seem to be over my head.
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory put 1000 tons of heavy water into a geodesic dome two miles deep in an abandoned nickel mine, up in Northern Ontario.
I last heard news about SNO about 6 years ago when they were building it, but haven't heard a thing since.
Anyone got any updates?
<a href=http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/>SNO</a>
Super Kamiokande sounds like one sweet Nintendo game! Hook me up!
They MIGHT use the time to build super-duper-K..
Actually, its successor will be Super Kamiokande Turbo Hyper Fighting Championship Edition.
Circle K's are a regional store. Not everyone has them.
Karma: -10 for a bad joke no one will get.
I'm not kidding. See, for example, this article.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
It should be obvious that the international physics community has joined fucked company. What were they thinking? There is absolutly no way to expect a neutron detector company will be proffitable. I mean, you can't see, hear, touch or eat neutrinos, what market share could they ever have? It never worked very well and it's just broken. Now that billions of dollars and a perfectly good lead mine has been wasted, only dedicated hobiest, terrorists and other inverts will ever reap the rewards of learning and intellectual achievement. Let this be a lesson to all you hippie scientists.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Here's what Snopes has to say about this. It is an urban legend.
When our group got to Japan, they had just drained the tank, and external hydrostatic pressures caused the floor and walls of the tank to start bulging in, and while we were inside the tank on Tuesday, August 27, 2001, our second day of work, we heard huge CRACK and reverberation sounds, which we later learned were the bolts holding the concrete liner to the rock breaking. it was unreal.
People started looking around to see who was making the noise. I followed a sharp guy out of the tank, while a lot of other people waited around the exit, I guess waiting for official word to leave. I sat in the jeep in a dark, radioheadish mine tunnel, continuing to hear loud, ominous crashes and bangs.
The next day everyone said "IT'S FINE, they FIXED IT, IT'S PERFECTLY SAFE, the Japanese engineers said I'TS PERFECTLY SAFE," and even "Don't you trust me?" but after asking many different people, I couldn't get a real explanation of what had happened, or even a feeling that anyone
knew what had happened. A friend's father, a mining engineer, was unimpressed with their solution to the problem (drilling holes in the
bottom of the tank to relieve the pressure) saying it would allow greater
pressures to build up elsewhere, later, and unexpectedly, and that unless the source of the water was found and pumped, there was no reason to think the situation was stabilized. He said it at least would need monitoring for a few days before people went in the tank again, which made sense to
me. My mom, who drills oil wells, was also concerned and wondered why they didn't have instrumentation to monitor what was going on outside the tank. at one point the japanese engineering company responsible for the
tank determined that there were 2m of water built up around the outside walls, and they determined this by hitting the wall with sticks and listening to the sounds.
When the bolts started breaking and it was scary as hell I realized I had never been shown an evacuation procedure ("getting the hell out" is what it is, I later learned, and that involves changing boots into slippers, crawling out of a slippery tunnel, getting out of a tyvek clean
suit, climbing down a ladder and putting on normal shoes, then sitting in
the car waiting for someone to come drive us out.)
I realized I had never been shown the location of a first aid kit, fire extinguisher, emergency breathing apparatus, emergency food and water (we
were 2km into a mine, after all)
So, a friend and I decided to take responsibility for our safety and we flew
home the next day.
The End.
This arrived in my mailbox:
``Many have heard by now of the SK disaster. Here is what I have learned:
Apparently an ID tube, most likely on the bottom of the detector,
imploded and set off a chain reaction destroying much of the detector to
about a depth of 2 meters or so below the current water level.
Apparently the top 7 supermodules and the top are intact.
The destruction is reported to be extensive with about 7000 ID and 1000
OD tubes destroyed. The various layers between the ID and OD are
shredded. There appears to be huge piles of glass and other debris on
the tank bottom. Waveshifter plates are shattered, cables perhaps
shredded, etc. The water is full of antimony and other hazardous
chemicals.
ICRR is shortly holding a press conference along with Monbushio (Sp?).
Reporters are milling about outside the mine entrance.
''
Also, Reuters has the story.
The supervisor probably told them, "Remember, you can't have too much water..." before he took off for lunch.
It went downhill from there.
3C
Yeah. If they keep this up, they'll need to undiscover the atom.
For me it seems to be that most of the /. readers do not have a clue what neutrino is so here is a link
neutrino
So make some studies before posting.
I think it was the one where the traveling gambling spaceships would land on a planet, take all the money from the planet, then leave. Someone had a mini-black hole and dropped it and it get falling through the planet and then when it go back to the other side it would come back and so and so forth.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Clinton snowballed the texas 11 billion dollar super collider...
If that thing was in place, humanity would be closer to understanding the secrets of the universe... I liked Clinton for all his economic policy, but fuck, to kick science in the balls is uncalled for.
God spoke to me
Alright, I confess, I was the one that caused the rip in space and time... I was overclocking my CPU to incredible speeds, when I got to the point that the instructions were being executed before they reached the processor. Now the two universes are coliding, now is not now, it's next week, and yesterday will be here tomorrow. Surprisingly, people honestly believe that lotter numbers for next week's game are showing up early simply because of time zones... And no body suspects a thing (except for those Unix people who get an error when the source files are than the current date-it's obvious that the early Unix developers had the forsight to impliment this feature purely to detect just such a rip in the fabric of time).
Appologies to bbspot.com
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant