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| Scientists beam in on particles that helped shape the universe |
| 2005-02-28 |
| They are one of the most common particles in the universe. You are no doubt oblivious to the 1,000 trillion of them flying through you every second and the 100 million or so that your own body produces every day. In fact, these mysterious particles are so elusive that it would take 10 light years of solid lead to stop one of them. And scientists know next to nothing about them. Welcome to the blurry world of neutrinos. But on Friday, that world will begin to move into focus. Deep under Chicago, scientists will switch on a remarkable new experiment that will fire a beam of neutrinos through 435 miles of solid rock in an at tempt to study them like never before. If it succeeds, scientists might finally be able to understand why these strange particles exist and how they have shaped the evolution of our universe. The Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (Minos), is a $180m (£94m) project involving more than 200 scientists in six countries. The UK government has contributed £6m and five British labs will be analysing the data from the experiment. "This is a very exciting time," said Geoff Pearce of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, one of the institutions that has been working on Minos. "After all the hard work designing and constructing the experiment, we can't wait for the data to start flowing." A decade in the making, Minos's first task will be to confirm the solution to a mystery that eluded physicists for decades. In the 1960s, physicists found that the number of neutrinos they detected from the Sun did not match their calculations. The detectors always came up with a third fewer neutrinos than they expected. The missing neutrino problem was finally cracked by Japanese and Canadian scientists in the late 1990s, who found that the neutrinos, which exist across the universe in three different types, or "flavours", were changing from one to the other en route to the Earth. The discovery had big implications for the Standard Model of physics, the cornerstone of scientists' mathematical description of the world. But the strangeness of neutrinos does not stop there. The mass that the particles do have is about a billion times less than all the other particles, something that has left particle physicists scratching their heads. So Minos will play the numbers game. Because the chances of it detecting a neutrino are so small - less than a million times smaller than winning the National Lottery, according to Mark Thomson, a particle physicist at Cambridge University - Minos will do the equivalent of buying billions of lottery tickets. |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #1 I think neutrinos are the packing dust left over from God's ACME Universe In A Box kit. ;) |
| Posted by: Laurence of the Rats 2005-02-28 2:44:55 PM |