Why are they trying to figure out and why is an underground lab in South Dakota and Fermilab in Illinois with rock in between them necessary?
Why are they trying to figure out and why is an underground lab in South Dakota and Fermilab in Illinois with rock in between them necessary?
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800 miles. Their website explains it pretty good. “These detectors will enable scientists to search for new subatomic phenomena and potentially transform our understanding of neutrinos and their role in the universe.”
https://www.dunescience.org/
I just went on a tour of Fermilab. If I understand correctly, the lab in South Dakota is a neutrino detector. The reason they shoot neutrinos underground is so they know they are detecting the neutrinos they created and not ones from the sun (because of the angle they arrive at the detector). Neutrinos rarely interact with normal matter. For all the neutrinos they shoot, they only detect about 20 per day. Really good tour!
To find out if the universe is made of matter or antimatter. To do so they are measuring something called neutrinos. Little tiny fuckers that move like a stream underground.
Neutrinos pass through rock and literally everything else almost like it’s not even there, so being underground is very convenient for detecting them – the rock blocks everything that isn’t a neutrino, so the few interactions that the neutrino detector sees can be reasonably assumed must be the extremely, extremely, extremely rare case of a neutrino interacting with matter.
This also connects with what makes working with neutrinos convenient – because they pass through matter so easily, it doesn’t matter where your detector and your emitter are. You can just aim them at each other through even thousands of miles of solid rock and the amount of neutrinos that reach the detector will be basically the same as if the emitter and detectors were right next to each other.
Well neutrinos aren’t going to be stopped by the rocks so there’s no point in getting the rock out of the way between the emitter and the detector.
I don’t remember the rest of the experiment but that’s why the rocks are there. Cuz they don’t need to be removed.
I’m really confused why you’re asking such a complicated specific question about something so technical and asking for the results like you’re five. Given the fact that you knew how to phrase this question in such a way, it sure seems like any search engine would point you in the right direction, give you a better answer MUCH MORE QUICKLY than some randos on the Internet. There’s definitely some ulterior motive here other than trying to get your question answered.
It’s like that Japanese project where they built giant water tanks underground. All that stuff is blocking all the random stuff that’s going on in space from messing up the science projects. It’s like wanting to see the stars but you live in the city so there’s a bunch of light pollution, so you travel to the middle of nowhere and then also build high walls so none of the other star’s light will mess with your telescope