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New Neutrino Detector Being Built In Minnesota
lithis writes "NOvA, a new neutrino detector, is being built in northern Minnesota. MPR has information on the project's funding and the International Falls Daily Journal talks about the environmental issues. This detector will complement the MINOS neutrino detector in the Soudan Underground Laboratory."
I was working on a neutrino detector last year. It had a very simple linux kernel running on chips to process each small group of mini-detectors. Meanwhile, the analysis software was running Red Hat Enterprise. Scientific Linux never caught on for us, but most detectors are using it now I believe.
To detect neutrinos.
Neutrinos are important for fundamental physics. Since the late 90s, we found out that they have mass (before, most people assumed that these little guys were massless like photons), and since this mass has to enter as a parameter to any fundamental theory of nature, experimental determination of this mass can constrain the proposed extensions to the Standard Model (which we know to be flawed because it doesn't answer some of the basic, fundamental questions).
I'm more curious about this from the link: "NOvA requires a high intensity neutrino beam."
I thought we couldn't really control neutrinos. We can't redirect them and can't block them. We can only detect a few in a billion (or probably more) and produce them as result of nuclear reactions.
I'm more curious about this from the link: "NOvA requires a high intensity neutrino beam." I thought we couldn't really control neutrinos. We can't redirect them and can't block them. We can only detect a few in a billion (or probably more) and produce them as result of nuclear reactions.
Many fewer than a few per billion. The mean free path of a neutrino is light years - in lead: http://www.ps.uci.edu/physics/news/nuexpt.html
Manmade neutrinos aren't just fission byproducts - particle collisions can also create neutrinos. One of the links mentions this neutrino beam results from proton collisions at the accelerator at Fermilab: http://www-nova.fnal.gov/images/NOVA-LookingNorth.jpg
Control the protons - control the neutrinos.
The Duluth News Tribune article (the second link in the summary) states that groundbreaking just happened on Friday. The MPR article mentions that work was supposed to start a while ago, but the funding was cut until the stimulus money reinstated it.