What is the Borexino detector?
Borexino is a particle physics experiment to study low energy (sub-MeV) solar neutrinos. The detector is the world’s most radio-pure liquid scintillator calorimeter. and will also help determine properties of neutrino oscillations, including the MSW effect.
What is the best location for a neutrino detector?
One of the best neutrino detectors is the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. Antarctica is a great place for a neutrino observatory because its thick layer of ice is great at absorbing all sorts of stray particles such as cosmic rays and gamma rays that can mess with your sensitive detectors.
What are neutrino detectors used for?
A neutrino detector is a physics apparatus which is designed to study neutrinos. Because neutrinos only weakly interact with other particles of matter, neutrino detectors must be very large to detect a significant number of neutrinos.
How does the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory work?
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. SNO was a heavy-water Cherenkov detector designed to detect neutrinos produced by fusion reactions in the sun. It used 1000 tonnes of heavy water loaned from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), and contained by a 12 meter diameter acrylic vessel.
How does the sun produce neutrinos?
Neutrinos are born during the process of nuclear fusion in the sun. In fusion, protons (the nucleus from the simplest element, hydrogen) fuse together to form a heavier element, helium. This releases neutrinos and energy that will eventually reach Earth as light and heat.
Why are neutrinos so hard to detect?
Why are neutrinos so hard to detect? Neutrinos are very hard to detect because they have no electric charge. But when a neutrino passes through matter, if it hits something dead-on, it will create electrically charged particles. And those can be detected.
How far can neutrinos travel?
The extra speed would mean that, over a distance of 621 miles (1,000 kilometers), neutrinos travel about 66 feet (20 meters) farther than light travels in the same amount of time.
Why it is difficult to detect neutrino?
What is unique about the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory?
It was planned, constructed and operated by more than 200 scientists from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Through its use of heavy water, the SNO detector provides unique ways to detect neutrinos from the Sun and other astrophysical objects and measure their properties.
How much did Snolab cost?
SNOLAB, Sudbury’s underground neutrino laboratory and research facility, will receive $28.6 million from the federal government to strengthen its operations — which includes employing 96 staff for three years.
How does Borexino work?
The properties of the subatomic elementary particle called neutrino have been studied by several experiments in the past decades. Borexino is one of the most advanced neutrino real time detectors and it works by exploiting an extremely intense source of neutrinos: our Solar System star, the Sun.
What is the best neutrino detector?
Borexino is one of the most advanced neutrino real time detectors and it works by exploiting an extremely intense source of neutrinos: our Solar System star, the Sun. The Sun is essentially a self-confining highly efficient nuclear fusion reactor whose production rate is regulated by the Weak Nuclear interaction.
What is Borexino at LNGS?
Borexino from the North side of LNGS ‘s underground Hall C in September 2015. It is shown close to being completely covered in thermal insulation (seen as a silvery wrapping) as an effort to further improve its unprecedented radiopurity levels. Borexino is a particle physics experiment to study low energy (sub-MeV) solar neutrinos.
How does a scintillator detect neutrinos?
A scintillator is a material that emits light when it is traversed by a subatomic charged particle, for instance an electron. The detection of neutrinos in Borexino is made by using electrons of the liquid scintillator as the target, according to the following the reaction: in which the neutrinos hit the electrons of the material.