To search for light flashes that indicate the existence of neutrinos, China
is placing thousands of sensors nearly a mile below the top of the
water.
To find the most illusive subatomic particles in the universe, China is
developing a device that will be buried deep beneath the ocean's
surface.
Tens of billions of these ghostly neutrinos pass through the Planet (and
your body) every second without coming into contact with anything. The
center of a rogue atom will occasionally impact with these neutrally charged
particles, producing an almost imperceptible spark of light.
In addition to letting them know that a neutrino was present, this flash of
light also enables them to speculate as to its possible source. Atoms
combine together deep inside the sun during nuclear processes, producing
some neutrinos. The neutrinos produced by those fusion processes leave the
solar in a matter of seconds. Nuclear fission, which occurs in nuclear
plants, is one source of some neutrinos. The Department of Energy claims
that neutrinos can even be released by the
potassium decomposing within a banana. Additionally, neutrinos were just discovered for the first time in the
Large Hadron Collider by scientists.
However, some neutrinos are solar system-external. These high-energy
neutrinos could have come from supernovas, pulsars, black holes, or some
other undiscovered phenomenon. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of
Sciences are looking for these high-energy neutrinos.
According
to Chen Mingjun, the project's chief scholar, the new detector will be
constructed with 55,000 instruments hanging 0.6 miles (1 km) below the
ocean's surface.
Clean water will improve the likelihood of finding neutrino signs,
according to Chen.
To better identify the erratic flashes of light that disclose a neutrino,
scientists must construct neutrino detectors in regions with a lot of
transparent materials. The National Science Foundation's IceCube Neutrino
Observatory in Antarctica is one example of an existing detector. It has
5,160 instruments and spans an area of about 0.2 cubic miles (1 cubic
kilometers), nearly a mile below the ice. The ice down there is transparent
enough for the instruments to detect the brief bursts of light.
There will be other undersea neutrino detectors in addition to the Chinese
one. The world's deepest lake, Lake Baikal in Siberia, is where Russia is
constructing the Baikal Gigaton Volume Detector (Baikal-GVD). The European
Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope, a multi-institutional partnership that
will search for neutrinos in the Mediterranean, is another forthcoming
project. Another multi-institution cooperation operating on a detector in
the Pacific Ocean, off the Canadian province of British Columbia, is the
Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment.
The Chinese device, however, will be much larger. According to Chen, the
55,000 monitors will encompass an area of 7 cubic miles (30 cubic km).
Finding out whether gamma rays and high-energy neutrinos may originate from
the same cosmic sources would be one of the detector's particular
objectives. Gamma rays, which are thought to be high-speed nuclear particles
from outside the solar system, were discovered in 2021 by the China Large
High Altitude Air Shower Observatory. We can identify the source of the
cosmic rays if the experts found neutrinos emanating from the same place,
Chen said.
