Lost A few Neutrinbo's, Gained Some Knowledge.

Somewhere between Illinois and Minnesota scientist's lost somethings, but there won't be a search for the ghost particles.

Neutrinos are incredibly elusive. They rarely interact with matter. They can pass right through you with ease and even through the entire Earth. This makes studying neutrinos very difficult. And, as it turns out, the scientists at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are happy they lost a few.

The scientists sent a beam of these ghostly particles from the Fermi site in Batavia, Illinois to a particle detector in Soudan, Minnesota, 450 miles away. Rather than flying through the air, the beam was directed right through the planet. As theory predicted, some of the particles didn’t make it.


LiveScience.com

I think this is very cool.

I've been hoping for a breakthrough (big or small) in the realm of Neutrino's, so this makes me happy.
(Or maybe that's the alcohol.)


Comments, Opinions?

No opinions at all really... this is just a reconfirmation of an observed event. The SNO (Sudbury Neutrino Observatory) already proved that neutrinos exist in many different types, and that they even have mass - but that it's so miniscule, that it doesn't fill the gap in Dark Matter that they were hoping to find.


On a side note for Neutrinos, when you realize how much "empty space" actually exists in normal matter, then you start to realize how amazing it is that some of these things ever hit anything and DON'T just pass through every all the time!

I mean, the phrase of 500 billion neutrinos passing through your finger in 5 seconds becomes unimportant when you realize not only how many atoms there are in your hand (hundreds of trillions), and so you have less than 1 neutrino passing through each atom... and then there's a LOT of space inside an atom... and a neutrino's smaller than an electron...

Man that's tiny...

So, are Neutrinos small enough that they pass through the open space between the nucleus and the electrons in an atom? I'm not entirely clear as to what the neutrinos are actually passing through.

Yup, neutrinos are that small.

Or I should say that the space between an electron and its nucleus is actually quite large!

Imagine a full sized football stadium. In the center of the field is a marble. This is the nucleus. Out at the very furthest bleachers... right up in the nosebleeds... at the point where you're just about to fall over into the parking lot, sits a crumb. This is the electron.

The rest of the space between them is empty nothingness.

Neutrinos are even smaller than electrons... and so as you can see, they got a LOT of space they can pass through!

How do they ever interact with anything? That's the thing, they very rarely do. Heavy Water, the key ingredient of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, is useful because its a clean (both environmentally and free of other "stuff" in it when it's made), dense, and transparent. Neutrinos will strike something in it more often than they would in regular water. They strike more dense objects even more often (which is to say, barely ever), because their atomic nuclei are larger (more marbles, so to say), and so there's slightly more chances for the neutrino to hit the nucleus and be detected.

Sure they could use Iron to stop neutrinos, but then it wouldn't be transparent, and you would never know that the event took place.

Ah, fun with physhics.

I watched something about this on NOVA. Pretty interesting stuff. It got me thinking of spontaneous combustion too. They showed how every so often when a neutrino collides head on with some particles it releases a high amount of energy. I thought maybe it was possible that that "spontaneous" collision could somehow spark spontaneous combustion. My research came out with nothing and my Physics teacher said absolutely not. So oh well, but still an interesting thing.