China hopes its giant laboratory 2,300 feet underground will be the key to beating the US in discovering the secrets of the universe’s most mysterious particles, the neutrino. After more than a decade of construction and scheduled for completion next year, the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) will cost about $311 million and rely on a 115-foot-wide stainless steel and acrylic spherical machine. It is designed to help measure incomprehensibly small subatomic units that move very little. At the speed of light. Despite blanketing the universe (100 trillion are thought to pass through our bodies every second), little is known about neutrinos and their behavior because they are so difficult to detect. yeah.
But if all goes according to plan, Chinese physicists are poised to make history by revealing information that could shed light on the so-called “popular class” problem. And they want to do it before anyone else.
“[Being] The former means everything, and the latter means nothing,” said Wang Yifan, JUNO project manager and director of the China Institute of High Energy Physics. AFP During a facility tour earlier this month.
Experts determined years ago that neutrinos likely occupy one of three mass states, but their weight from heaviest to lightest remains unknown. If researchers can figure them out, the new information could help build a more complete Standard Model of particle physics, and could also expand our knowledge of the inner workings of planets, stars, and supernovae. I don’t know. JUNO’s potential mass hierarchy discovery could even force physicists to reconsider established scientific facts, especially in the case of quantum mechanics.
“If JUNO shows that our understanding is wrong, it will be a revolution,” Patrick Huber, director of the Neutrino Physics Center at American University, Virginia Tech, said on October 17.
[Related: The Milky Way’s ghostly neutrinos have finally been found.]
Once researchers fire up JUNO, they plan to focus on neutrinos emitted by two nuclear power plants located on either side of the underground facility, about 53 miles apart. But unraveling the neutrino mass hierarchy is not as simple as measuring the neutrino’s (very small) weight. Experts believe it will take about six years’ worth of experimentation and analysis to finally arrive at an answer to the mass hierarchy problem.
Meanwhile, other similar projects are scheduled to begin at facilities such as the US-led IceCube Observatory in Antarctica and Japanese observatories. Super-Kamiokande Laboratory. Meanwhile China Looks like it’s progressing now of the game compared to competitorsan unexpected twist in physics research reveals that anyone can be the first to discover the answer to the mass hierarchy, as long as they have extensive working knowledge of some of the universe’s most complex sciences. means. Access to a giant glowing steel detection sphere underground would also probably be a good asset.
