Patrick Allison will host the Hack Chat on Wednesday, January 17 at noon Pacific.
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It's a paradox of science that the biggest of equipment is needed to study the smallest of phenomena. The bestiary of subatomic particles often requires the power and dimension of massive accelerators to produce, and caverns crammed with racks full of instruments to monitor their brief but energetic lives. Neutrinos, though, are different. These tiny, nearly massless, neutral particles are abundant in the extreme, zipping through space from sources both natural and artificial and passing through normal matter like it isn't even there.
That poses a problem: how do you study something that doesn't interact with the stuff you can make detectors out of? There are tricks that neutrino hunters use, and most of them use very, VERY big instruments to do it. Think enormous tanks of ultrapure water or a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, filled with photomultiplier tubes to watch for the slightest glimmer of Cherenkov radiation as a neutrino passes by, or a balloon hovering 100 km above Antarctica using the entire continent as a detector.
Neutrino hunting is some of the biggest of Big Science, and getting all the parts to work together takes some special engineering. Patrick Allison has been in the neutrino business for decades, both as a physicist and as the designated guru who keeps all the electronics humming. He'll join us on the Hack Chat to talk about the neutrino hunting trade, and what it takes to keep the data flowing.
Banner image: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
There also is a big neutrino experiment called KM3net, based on detection of secondary events from neutrino interaction with sea-water on about 3 km depth in the Mediterranean, South of the French coast and near Sicily. A third location near the coast of Greece is under consideration. The design foresees the monitoring of a cubic kilometer seawater with anchored strings of 13 balls, each equipped with ~30 photo multipliers.
The received signals are modulated on light with a vast set of wavelengths, to create the number of communication channels to transfer the vast amount of data.
For more info: https://www.km3net.org/