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Underwater telescope to study neutrinos

Posted by Hemos on from the to-study-space-go-underwater dept.

Darksky wrote to us with information about the proposed 'Antares' telescope. The proposal would be to put a telescope 2.4 kilometers underwater, in an attempt to study neutroino/cosmic rays. The telescope would use the the Earth as shield from cosmic rays, and hopefully study the muons liberated by the neutrinos.

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  1. Re:who woulda thunk... by mph · · Score: 5
    The first solar neutrino detector was at the Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. It used perchloroethylene, a cleaning fluid, to provide chlorine which would be converted to argon in a reaction with neutrinos. You have to count the argon atoms periodically, so you don't get immediate notification of an event, nor good time resolution.

    Mont Blanc uses a liquid scintillator, which emits a flash when a neutrino event occurs. This approach has the advantage of providing immediate notification and good time resolution.

    The detector with the coolest name is Super Kamiokande, in Japan. It was originally designed to detect proton decay by observing the Cerenkov radiation from the fast electrons that would be a decay product, but it also can detect neutrinos. It also provides immediate notification and good time resolution.

    The most famous result from neutrino detectors is that the observations of the solar neutrino emission do not agree well with theoretical predictions.

    In addition to the detection of solar neutrinos, neutrino detectors also scored big-time by detecting the neutrino burst of supernova 1987a. Because neutrinos pass through just about anything, these observations were useful probes of what was happening at the center of the SN.

    Notes for a talk I gave in an undergrad class are available at http://wopr.caltech.edu/~mph/papers /neutrino.ps. References to other works are included.