Low-Energy Neutrinos Detected In Real Time

Roland Piquepaille sends us word of first results from the Borexino detector in Italy, where an international team of more than 100 researchers has detected low-energy solar neutrinos for the first time. These results confirm recent "theories about the nature of neutrinos and the inner workings of the sun and other stars." In particular, it's now almost certain that neutrinos oscillate among three types, namely electron, muon, and tau neutrinos. The Borexino detector lies almost a mile underground near L'Aquila, Italy, and it sets new standards in the purity of the materials used in its construction.

Comments

Neutrinos

[the_kanzure]

* Neutrino
* History of the neutrinos [from our perspective, mind you]
* The Ultimate Neutrino Page
etc. I should go call up my particle physicist body to post up some comments. :)

The paper

[Angstroman]

For those interested, the paper itself can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.2251v1. The team is detecting neutrinos from Be 7 at the rate of 47 per day.

Some basic papers

[the_kanzure]

TASI 2002 lectures on neutrinos [Yuval Grossman] [PDF]:

We present a pedagogical review of neutrino physics. In the first lecture we describe the theoretical motivation for neutrino masses, and explain how neutrino flavor oscillation experiments can probe neutrino masses. In the second lecture we review the experimental data, and show that it is best explained if neutrinos are massive. In the third lecture we explain what are the theoretical implications of the data, in particular, what are the challenges they impose on models of physics beyond the SM. We give examples of theoretical models that cop e with some of these challenges.

Neutrino physics [Evgeny Khakimovich Akhmedov] [PDF]:

In the present lectures the following topics are considered: general properties of neutrinos, neutrino mass phenomenology (Dirac and Majorana masses), neutrino masses in the simplest extensions of the standard model (including the seesaw mechanism), neutrino oscillations in vacuum, neutrino oscillations in matter (the MSW effect) in 2- and 3-flavour schemes, implications of CP, T and CPT symmetries for neutrino oscillations, double beta decay, solar neutrino oscillations and the solar neutrino problem, and atmospheric neutrinos. We also give a short overview of the results of the accelerator and reactor neutrino experiments and of future projects. Finally, we discuss how the available experimental data on neutrino masses and lepton mixing can be summarized in the phenomenologically allowed forms of the neutrino mass matrix.

BTW, particle physics has an awesome WWW presence.

Re:Some basic papers

[sholden]

BTW, particle physics has an awesome WWW presence.

It's almost as if the world's largest particle physics laboratory had something to do with creating it.

Spooky!

Gran Sasso

[xPsi]

Borexino is really an amazing detector, but has a complex history. The experiment is located at an impressive place called the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS) in Italy. Technically, it is one of the deepest labs in the world as measured by overburdon -- i.e. it has about a kilometer of rock in every direction to shield cosmic rays-- but is actually located high up in the mountains. Interestingly, it is almost directly under where Mussolini was held prisoner and subsequently rescued by German commandos at Campo Imperatore in 1943. It is also near where the movie Ladyhawke was filmed. Anyway, back in 2002 there was a chemical accident when some of the liquid scintillator material (highly toxic) got into the local ground water. The leak was an honest mistake and was actually rather minor as chemical spills go, but it caused a public relations debacle which tangled up the lab and, in particular, Borexino, in a long bureaucratic nightmare. I'm happy to see they are now back in the game producing cutting-edge results.

No, parent poster was correct

[Flying pig]

And in my view insightful rather than funny. Al Gore was a political proponent of the Internet. But the concept of the www (which is just one of the many services running on dat ole Internet)did indeed originate in CERN.

People often suggest on /. that progress on the Internet is driven by the needs of pornographers. But it would be interesting to know how much progress in networking and databases is actually driven by the (huge) data recording and analysis needs of particle physicists. My own interest in operating systems,networks and databases was started by the need to log large amounts of data very fast from lightning strike simulation experiments.

Re:Oops! My bad!

[aicrules]

Not so fast! Try taking a drink from the firehose on this one. You'll see that while the main link is still there, he DID include a link back to ZDnet that got edited out!

Re:Neutrinos massless = timeless, but change state

[Angstroman]

Indeed, the presumed oscillations imply that the mass of the neutrino is small, but not zero. See, for example http://focus.aps.org/story/v2/st10 for a good discussion. Getting a good experimental measure of the mass of a particle that interacts so weakly with detectors has been a very long running challenge in experimental physics.

Low-Latency, Direct Communications

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

I'm going to wax somewhat sci-fi here and imagine that detection in real-time of neutrinos might have potential application in regards to communication tech.

In my view I see the ability to detect neutrinos as the first step towards a truly peerless communication system. Imagine that instead of radio waves one were to use neutrino emissions for communication. There would be no (or very little) interference (pass straight through any material) and subsequently the latency of communication from any point on the globe would be decided by the diameter not the circumference of the com point's positions on the earth - meaning that communication delays would be greatly reduced.

Imagine if any communications device could simply connect directly to any other device on the planet at low-latency with high-signal strength - wouldn't that be neat!

Re:Oops! My bad!

[Mr. Underbridge]

Well then, my compliments to kdawson for showing the way and doing some actual editing.

Today's weather forcast calls for airborne swine throughout the country, and a blizzard localized to Hell.