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Science

Physicists Start Detecting Signs of Neutrinos At Large Hadron Collider (phys.org) 34

Posted by EditorDavid from the peering-at-particles dept.
"The international Forward Search Experiment team, led by physicists at the University of California, Irvine, has achieved the first-ever detection of neutrino candidates produced by the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility near Geneva, Switzerland," reports Phys.org.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared their report: In a paper published Friday in the journal Physical Review D, the researchers describe how they observed six neutrino interactions during a pilot run of a compact emulsion detector installed at the LHC in 2018. "Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider," said co-author Jonathan Feng, UCI Distinguished Professor of physics & astronomy and co-leader of the FASER Collaboration. "This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the universe."

He said the discovery made during the pilot gave his team two crucial pieces of information. "First, it verified that the position [480 meters] forward of the ATLAS interaction point at the LHC is the right location for detecting collider neutrinos," Feng said. "Second, our efforts demonstrated the effectiveness of using an emulsion detector to observe these kinds of neutrino interactions...."

"Given the power of our new detector and its prime location at CERN, we expect to be able to record more than 10,000 neutrino interactions in the next run of the LHC, beginning in 2022," said co-author David Casper, FASER project co-leader and associate professor of physics & astronomy at UCI. "We will detect the highest-energy neutrinos that have ever been produced from a human-made source."
The article also points out that in future experiments the researchers hope to explore dark matter — and how it interacts with normal atoms.
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Physicists Start Detecting Signs of Neutrinos At Large Hadron Collider More

Physicists Start Detecting Signs of Neutrinos At Large Hadron Collider

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  • time to stock up on crow bars? (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Saturday November 27, 2021 @03:44PM (#62026001)

    time to stock up on crow bars?

  • They must have generated to a crazy number of neutrinos to actually detect any of them! Very impressive.

    • And have crazy dense detector, of course

      Apparatus was alternating lead and tungsten plates with photographic emulsion between them

      • Re:Wow! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by dsgrntlxmply ( 610492 ) on Saturday November 27, 2021 @04:41PM (#62026155)
        Once upon a time, a physicist from one of the national labs brought to a guest lecture, a tungsten plate about the size of a Pop Tart, among various demonstration items. Handling a couple of broken light bulb filaments does not give a comparable impression of how dense this stuff is.

        • Re: Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by jddj ( 1085169 ) on Saturday November 27, 2021 @05:09PM (#62026253) Journal

          Even little Pinewood Derby tungsten weights (the hot tip, since lead's no longer allowed) are impressively dense. Flipping them around in my hand gives me a "how can this be?" feeling.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Tungsten is about 80% denser than lead and about on a par with gold and uranium, but a little lighter than platinum.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      The higher the energy, the more likely neutrinos are to interact. The typical "can go through x light years of lead" ones are low energy from fusion reactions. CERN wants to study high energy ones.

    • Yes - although accelerators have been doing this for decades at CERN with the SPS [home.cern], at Fermilab [fnal.gov], in Japan [t2k-experiment.org] to list but a few.

      The only thing new here is that the accelerator is operating in collider mode which is interesting but the neutrinos will not be any higher in energy than the ones produced if they had run the accelerator in fixed target mode. There is no real physics benefit from collider-mode neutrinos that I can think of but it does mean that they can study high-energy neutrinos while the LHC is r
      • What determines the energy of a neutrino? The speed at which it passes by any particle it might interact with?
        • No - the energy of a neutrino is determined by how much it is given in the interaction that creates it. Think of it like a ball. The harder you throw a ball the more energy it has. The same goes for a neutrino, or indeed, any particle. How much energy you can give it though is determined by physics: you have to conserve both energy and momentum.

          In a collider, there is no net momentum since you have two beams with equal and opposite momenta. Hence, if a neutrino shoots out in one direction there have to b
  • https://t2k-experiment.org/neu... [t2k-experiment.org] What are neutrinos? Neutrinos are a kind of elementary particle â" that is, they are subatomic particles which donâ(TM)t give any indication of being made of smaller pieces. They are similar to electrons, except that electrons have electric charge â"1 (in the units particle physicists use; in SI units thatâ(TM)s â"1.6Ã--10-19 coulombs), whereas neutrinos have no electric charge. Neutrinos are also much less massive than electrons â" not

  • Confusing headline (Score:5, Informative)

    by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Saturday November 27, 2021 @04:56PM (#62026201)

    When this headline popped up I thought it was phys.org being confused again, but it's technically correct. Neutrinos are routinely produced and detected at particle accelerators shooting protons at stationary targets. This seems to be the first time they've been detected from a particle collider, shooting particles at other particles.

  • The science of neutrinos is still fairly crude. Now that they can generate and detect neutrinos at will, we may to be able to understand why there don't seem to be any sterile neutrinos.

  • But they are not the supersymmetric partners that the string theory community was so confident that the LHC would detect. No supersymmetry implies that string theory requires twenty-six dimensions to make sense. Ten or eleven are difficult enough to swallow, for there is no evidence whatsoever for them. Twenty-six? Maybe we should try to come up with new ideas.
    • Lots of people are trying to come up with better ideas. There is so much existing data to fit that its not easy.

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