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."

Minneosta

[Frankie70]

Where in the hell is "Minneosta"?

Re:Minneosta

[the_other_chewey]

Where in the hell is "Minneosta"?

Right north of Iawo.

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[JamesP]

I though it was right below Sasquatchewan

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[thejuggler]

nope, just south of Onterio. Where did you people learn geography?

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[Assassin bug]

Get the acronym right! It's Iowa!

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[auric_dude]

Could be worse, could have been sited in Waxahachie, TX.

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[Anonymous Coward]

> Waxahachie

Gesundheit!

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[Roger W Moore]

Ha! The Welsh are experts at bizarre place names: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch [wikipedia.org].

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[DreamsAreOkToo]

Evidence that a true hell would be really, really, cold. And have swarms of mosquitoes.

I want to move away :(

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[osu-neko]

Really, really cold, definitely, but why are you seeing swarms of mosquitoes in the server room? o.O

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[oldhack]

East of Siberia, lots of dinosaur fossils, I think.

Re:Minneosta

[verloren]

Don't know, but it looks quite nice:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/minneosta/ [flickr.com]

Re:Minneosta

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

I think it was funnier before I noticed the misspelling.

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[lithis]

Dang. I got an error the first time I tried submitting this article, so I rushed through the second time I wrote it. It must be in the water up here, though, 'cause they misspelled Alec Habig [umn.edu] in the article.

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[thejuggler]

Where's Minesota? haha Minnesota is where I call home and I lived way up there near these mines in the town of Ely. These mines are about 30 miles south of the Canadian border. This is also where most of our iron ore used to come from.

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[GreenTech11]

Thanks for that. DNRTFA, but what the hell is a neutrino detector for?

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[commlinx]

Thanks for that. DNRTFA, but what the hell is a neutrino detector for?

Without one your TARDIS may be dumped into a Z-neutrino core by Daleks before you know about it.

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[RudeIota]

Well, the obvious answer is: "To detect neutrons". But here's much more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector [wikipedia.org]

Neutrons appear to be useful in quantum particle experiments.

Re:Reccesions

[risk one]

I know, right? If only there were some clue in the name...

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[bkpark]

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

Neutrino beams (was Re:Reccesions)

[rlseaman]

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 [uci.edu]

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 [fnal.gov]

Control the protons - control the neutrinos.

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[bkpark]

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 [fnal.gov] [fnal.gov]

Control the protons - control the neutrinos.

The part that I can't understand is how they can make such ... well-collimated beam, and I can't find any reference that explains the mechanism clearly (say, clear enough to a physicist whose expertise isn't particle physics).

I mean, how exactly should the protons be controlled? Given that neutrinos take away so little momentum and are always ultra relativistic, it probably doesn't matter what direction (and how fast) protons or the decay source were moving at ... and AFAICS the only other thing that might

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[mako1138]

In the center-of-mass frame, the reaction products are distributed isotropically. (Probably; neutrinos are not my area of expertise.) However, the center-of-mass frame is moving relativistically in the direction the proton beam is going. Hence in the lab frame, the resulting neutrino beam will favor a certain direction.

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[FranklinWebber]

Hello bkpark,

One simple answer to your question is: conservation of momentum. Each proton is given a huge momentum in the Fermilab accelerator, then directed against a target, say, a steel plate. Each proton interacts with some particle in the target, producing, typically, a large collection of other particles. Most, if not all, of these new particles will be carrying a substantial fraction of the original proton's momentum and will therefore be going in nearly the same direction as the proton. The neut

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[MichaelSmith]

I wouldn't be at all surprised.

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[hort_wort]

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.

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[habig]

Yes.

The computing needs of both the current (MINOS) and future (Nova) detectors are primarily linux boxes, both of data acquisition and analysis.

Finally!

[Shag]

It's about time someone found a use for northern Minnesota. :)

(Shout-outs to my friends at the call-center in Chisholm)

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[Assassin bug]

You mean, other than logging, mink farming, and fly breeding.

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[osu-neko]

And camping. I highly recommend the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. I've been to the Black Hills, the Rockies, both oceans and the Gulf, all over this US of A, and they all have their beauty and charms, but the BWCA on the Minnesota-Ontario border is the most beautiful place I know. Just make sure to bring the mosquito repellent. ;)

Minnesota is the perfect location for...

[Anonymous Coward]

...detecting neutrinos.

Nothing else ever happens around here.

Cold, lonley, but way cool.

[juan large moose]

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 [state.mn.us]

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[Hurricane78]

Mmmm... underground cake...

Thank you for the details though. Sounds really interesting. Unfortunately I'm very far away from Minnesota, or even the USA.

Johnny Five said it best

[isny]

No Nova! No disassemble!

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[lithis]

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.

Psshh... looking for neutrinos?

[Follier]

Really. How dense can you be?