Posted on 03/10/2021 3:44:45 PM PST by BenLurkin
On December 6, 2016, a high-energy particle called an electron antineutrino hurtled to Earth from outer space at close to the speed of light carrying 6.3 petaelectronvolts (PeV) of energy. Deep inside the ice sheet at the South Pole, it smashed into an electron and produced a particle that quickly decayed into a shower of secondary particles. The interaction was captured by a massive telescope buried in the Antarctic glacier, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
IceCube had seen a Glashow resonance event, a phenomenon predicted by Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow in 1960. With this detection, scientists provided another confirmation of the Standard Model of particle physics. It also further demonstrated the ability of IceCube, which detects nearly massless particles called neutrinos using thousands of sensors embedded in the Antarctic ice, to do fundamental physics.
Sheldon Glashow first proposed this resonance in 1960 when he was a postdoctoral researcher at what is today the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. There, he wrote a paper in which he predicted that an antineutrino (a neutrino's antimatter twin) could interact with an electron to produce an as-yet undiscovered particle—if the antineutrino had just the right energy—through a process known as resonance.
When the proposed particle, the W- boson, was finally discovered in 1983, it turned out to be much heavier than what Glashow and his colleagues had expected back in 1960. The Glashow resonance would require a neutrino with an energy of 6.3 PeV, almost 1,000 times more energetic than what CERN's Large Hadron Collider is capable of producing. In fact, no human-made particle accelerator on Earth, current or planned, could create a neutrino with that much energy.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
ping
A classic
I was there, I saw it, I thought it was just a firecracker going off..........Hmmm, whadda ya know.
You didn’t know they had to move it to keep it safe? The fencing wasn’t available due to Pelosi’s recent requisition orders.
I’m familiar with the terms due to education. I’m astounded by the sheer engineering and physics of this. Had never read about this observatory/sensor network before.
Electrons With Attitude!
I saw a show about this detector. Amazing technology!
heh
I almost worked on that project until a Democrat congress cancelled the project, 25 years ago. Someone else must have finally built it.
Sheldon Glashow is a frequent participant in the Ig Nobel awards.
https://www.improbable.com/ig-about/
Described by one fan as:
“It’s like the weirdest f-ing thing that you’ll ever go to… it’s a collection of, like, actual Nobel Prize winners giving away prizes to real scientists for doing f’d-up things… it’s awesome.”
—Amanda Palmer
And exactly what is the use of these electron antineutrinos?
Because neutrinos have such a tiny interaction with matter they go from the core of a star right into space without much blockage. It is a good way to test if a theory of nuclear physics is any good. In fact for a long time the measured amount was one third of the predicted amount from fusion inside the sun. It was discovered latter on that neutrinos come in 3 types that switch around in flight.
Good nuclear physics makes great bombs that keeps our enemies from attacking us.
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