Neutrinos are known as “ghost particles” because they don’t interact with other particles. In the past, we could only search for low-energy neutrinos from the sun. Now, scientists confirm the first discovery of high-energy neutrinos from a new source: the Large Hadron Collider Neutrinos, in addition to drawing a new page in particle astrophysics, also represent the potential of particle colliders being exploited to the extreme.
Neutrinos are one of the most abundant subatomic particles in the universe, second only to photons, but they are very tiny, have no charge, have a mass close to zero, and hardly interact with other particles, so although neutrinos are usually found in violent environments (nuclear fusion inside stars, supernova explosions, black holes, etc.), and you don’t notice them in your daily life. For example, hundreds of billions of neutrinos are flowing through your body now, but you don’t know it.
Underground detectors isolated from other radiation sources, such as IceCube in Antarctica, Super-Kamiokande in Japan, and MiniBooNE in Fermilab, can detect faint bursts of light produced by the collision of low-energy neutrinos produced by the sun with other particles, but those produced by supernova explosions High-energy neutrinos remain a mystery to us, so physicists have long searched for high-energy neutrinos produced in particle collider environments.
The FASER experiment (Forward Search Experiment) is one of the eight particle physics experiments under the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Tungsten plates are separated by a layer of latex. When neutrinos hit the nuclei in the tungsten plates and generate other particles that flow through the latex, the traces left behind will be “developed”, and scientists need to develop these metal plates like developing photos. to analyze particle trajectories.
In late 2021, data from the Large Hadron Collider had tentatively characterized neutrinos interacting with other particles, and after spending more than a year collecting more data, the UC Irvine team is now announcing that they are real!
The new detection results will help explain how stars burn and explode, how the interaction of high-energy neutrinos in the universe triggers the production of other particles in space, and explore the environment in which high-energy neutrinos are born.
FASER has yet to find other signs of dark matter, but the detector stands ready to record any as the Large Hadron Collider prepares to launch another round of particle collision experiments.
The research results were presented at the 57th Rencontres de Moriond Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories conference.
(First image source: CERN)
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