Physicists Start Detecting Signs of Neutrinos At Large Hadron Collider

"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.

time to stock up on crow bars?

[Joe_Dragon]

time to stock up on crow bars?

Re: Fusion power in 30 years!!!!

[BytePusher]

Where did the article mention fusion? And why the anti-fusion propaganda, Mr. Anonymous Coward(AKA Fossil fuel shill?)

Re:

[fahrbot-bot]

And why the anti-fusion propaganda, Mr. Anonymous Coward (AKA Fossil fuel shill?)

I'm sure he'll change his tune when it becomes necessary for crypto-miners to have a fusion reactor to power their rigs -- to complete one block ... :-)

...and a firework is like a Hydrogen Bomb

[Roger W Moore]

The LHC operates at energies that will not only shatter any nucleus but which will shatter the protons and neutrons in that nucleus. The collision energy is more than a million times the energy of a fusion reaction between protons and about 10,000 times higher than an anti-matter reaction between a proton and anti-proton. Claiming it is like fusion is like saying a firework is like a hydrogen bomb.

Re: Fusion power in 30 years!!!!

[backslashdot]

You morons keep changing the amount you claim we always say fusion as being away. Sometimes you say 50? Other times 30, 25, 10, or 5. What is constant is your (often successful) attempts to defund it. Oil shill. Nevertheless, and in spite of the budget cuts, progress is being made. What is remarkable is the fact that progress is made in spite of all the negativity, disinformation, and budget cuts.

Re:

[x_t0ken_407]

It's like you didn't even bother reading the title lol

Wow!

[Gravis Zero]

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

Re:

[iggymanz]

And have crazy dense detector, of course

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

Re:Wow!

[dsgrntlxmply]

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!

[jddj]

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:

[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:

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Just Interesting

[Roger W Moore]

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

Re:

[timeOday]

What determines the energy of a neutrino? The speed at which it passes by any particle it might interact with?

Re:

[Roger W Moore]

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

Re:

[timeOday]

This was making no sense to me until reading this article on how it is possible to have energy without mass via momentum:

https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/... [wtamu.edu]

Re:

[x_t0ken_407]

Thank you for that explanation. Physics has always been fascinating to me.

What are neutrinos?

[FeltLion]

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

Re:What are neutrinos?

[Striek]

Aye, but what is a "wall of text"?

Jesus dude, use paragraphs.

Re: What are neutrinos?

[Slashythenkilly]

He was answering a question posted by another reader. The phrase youre looking for is "thank you"

Re:

[pilaftank]

Thank you sir! May I have another!

Re:

[gtall]

You: Alex, I'd like paragraph breaks for $800:

Alex: Okay, they break text into manageable chucks so normal people will want to read it.

You: Uh. . .damn. . .I know this one, What is punctuation?

Alex: Ooooo, sorry, you don't get to enter the Kingdom of G-d, but thanks for playing.

Confusing headline

[ceoyoyo]

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.

This may be very good

[jd]

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.

Re: This may be very good

[IdanceNmyCar]

Because we don't know how to neuter neutrinos... yet?

Neutrinos are fine

[OneHundredAndTen]

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.

Re:

[joe_frisch]

Lots of people are trying to come up with better ideas. There is so much existing data to fit that its not easy.

Re:

[John Cavendish]

Higgs field, neutrinos and many, many other theoretical works had had no experimental basis ... till they had.
Strings theory maybe is not right, but it explains gravity in a straightforward way.

Re: Neutrinos are fine

[IdanceNmyCar]

I have never heard anyone claiming string theory explains anything in a straight forward way. ELI5, how does string theory explain gravity.

Re: Neutrinos are fine

[ami.one]

:) Since I couldn't resist a 'straightforward ' explanation/cause of gravity I went looking and ended up here:
https://ncse.ngo/gravity-its-o... [ncse.ngo]
Started off nice n simple as expected from a 'national center for science n education' and then it went to full implosion in like 2.3 seconds. Must read.

And to think I had already fwd to 2 guys I keep having disputes with (regarding gravity)

Re:

[OneHundredAndTen]

Two problems. One, all those particles were found pretty much at the energy regimes that were expected. Supersymmetric partners have not, and their proponents just keep saying that we have to search higher at higher energies, without providing any theoretical justification other than the theory is so beautiful that it has be to true. Two, at best, string theory predicts a Brans-Dicke-like theory of gravity in ten or eleven spatial dimensions, not general relativity in three. Without supersymmetry, twenty-si

Re:

[John Cavendish]

Good clarification, thank you.

My point was that any theoretical work had to wait for prove - it was the same with the General Theory of Relativity among others, and the deeper "we" go the rabbit hole the more difficult it is to collect the evidence in physics just by the shier barrier of energies involved.

The String theory is a neat theory, yet complicated and unresolved in details, theoreticians are free to pursue ideas and it's good for science. Einstein himself stated that many predictions of his theory