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Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
Neutrino Day
Jul 13
Other Scottish Country Dances for this Day
Today's Musings, History & Folklore
"I have done a terrible thing: I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected."
~ Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958)
"Neutrinos, won't you join the dance?" First postulated in 1930, detected in 1956, these invisible, fundamental, and elusive tiny particles were more recently demonstrated to have special characteristics which has altered our understanding of the basic building blocks of matter and the laws governing the universe! Each time we put on our dancing shoes, we are being bombarded with these invisible particles! Theoretical and experimental physicists nowadays spend much of their time hunting the invisible and devising experiments and methods to indirectly detect the formerly undetectable! Devised by Kristy Closser and dedicated to a dancing physicist, Kevin Lesko's leadership at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) played a crucial role in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory's (SNO) 2015 Nobel Prize win. He led the design of key experimental components, including the spherical geodesic detector, reflected in the shape of this reel's square set and the ending Schiehallion reels! Once thought to be massless, neutrinos have no charge and possess an extremely small mass, allowing them to travel great distances unimpeded, but making them exceedingly difficult to detect! About 65 billion neutrinos pass through just one square centimeter of area on earth, every second! Over the course of one's lifetime, about 10^23 neutrinos will stream through your dancing ghillies – that’s almost a trillion trillions dancing partners who tread but lightly on your dancing feet! ⚛️ ⚛️ ⚛️
Reel of the Neutrino
The Sanford Underground Laboratory (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota, celebrates Neutrino Day, a science festival focussing on the engineering and science behind the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), one of several labs throughout the world that focus on this elementary particle.
A neutrino(denoted by the Greek letter ν) is a fermion (an elementary particle with half-integer spin) that interacts only via the weak subatomic force and gravity. The mass of the neutrino is much smaller than that of the other known elementary particles.
In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Takaaki Kajita in Japan and Arthur B. McDonald in Canada, for their key contributions to the experiments which demonstrated that neutrinos change identities.
From the 2015 press release:
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 recognises Takaaki Kajita in Japan and Arthur B. McDonald in Canada, for their key contributions to the experiments which demonstrated that neutrinos change identities. This metamorphosis requires that neutrinos have mass. The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe.
Around the turn of the millennium, Takaaki Kajita presented the discovery that neutrinos from the atmosphere switch between two identities on their way to the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan.
Meanwhile, the research group in Canada led by Arthur B. McDonald could demonstrate that the neutrinos from the Sun were not disappearing on their way to Earth. Instead they were captured with a different identity when arriving to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.
A neutrino puzzle that physicists had wrestled with for decades had been resolved. Compared to theoretical calculations of the number of neutrinos, up to two thirds of the neutrinos were missing in measurements performed on Earth. Now, the two experiments discovered that the neutrinos had changed identities.
The discovery led to the far-reaching conclusion that neutrinos, which for a long time were considered massless, must have some mass, however small.
For particle physics this was a historic discovery. Its Standard Model of the innermost workings of matter had been incredibly successful, having resisted all experimental challenges for more than twenty years. However, as it requires neutrinos to be massless, the new observations had clearly showed that the Standard Model cannot be the complete theory of the fundamental constituents of the universe.
For more on the hunt for the neutrino, click the colliding neutrinos.
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