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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."
Where in the hell is "Minneosta"?
Without one your TARDIS may be dumped into a Z-neutrino core by Daleks before you know about it.
It's about time someone found a use for northern Minnesota. :)
(Shout-outs to my friends at the call-center in Chisholm)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
...detecting neutrinos.
Nothing else ever happens around here.
I know, right? If only there were some clue in the name...
I've been to the Soudan mine and the underground lab. Heck, I helped get them wired up. The network at the site is all fibre-optic and, except for the VAXen they still had running a few of years back, it is (or was) all very state-of-the art. The uplink, however, is a different story.
Perhaps this new project, which they've actually been working on for years, will give them the boost they need to get a fiber run from Ely. Maybe they've gotten it already. When I was working with the project, we had to run fiber to a hut on a hill, run coax to the other company's hut, microwave the signal to Tower, MN, and then run it over 11 pair of copper to Soudan.
It worked.
If you like the outdoors and like to travel, it's beautiful country up there. If you don't mind the skeeters and the black flies. The Soudan Mine is actually a state park, and during the summer months you can visit. They run tours down the mine on a regular basis. You ride a car down an incline into the mine, about a half mile down and they walk you around and show you how the mining was done. Greenstone and iron... the iron so pure you can weld to it.
If you catch the 10 am tour (double check me on that before you go) you also get a tour of the Physics lab. It puts the BatCave to shame--and yes, there are plenty of bats down there. The lab is carved out of the rock and iron of the mine and it looks like a set from a War Games or Dr. Strangelove type movie. Huge (very) steel plates hang from railings overhead, with fine fiber optic cable running through them, trying to catch a glimpse of a neutrino or two as they fly through. The neutrinos, of course, are being fired at Soudan from Fermilab in Illinois.
Worth the trip, just to see the mine, but the Physics lab is icing on the underground cake.
http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_parks/soudan_underground_mine/index.html
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.