Part of the undersea KM3NET neutrino detector
km3net
The incredibly powerful neutrinos that tore a new Mediterranean particle detector have surprised physicists, and it is the first glimpse into some of the universe’s most intense events, such as the merge of ultrafine black holes. Masu.
Neutrinos, sometimes called “ghost particles,” interact with most problems, because they have little mass and no charge. This is a huge amount of dense density, such as water or ice, in the hope that a neutrino detector will usually produce a shower of particles that will knock on the atoms and reveal subtle signs of their existence. This means that it incorporates substances.
Damian Dornick The Centre for Particle Physics in Marseille, France and his colleagues did just that and found the most energetic neutrino I’d ever seen. The team used the Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope (km3net), a pair of detector arrays, located at the bottom of the Mediterranean where they picked up neutrinos on February 13, 2023. Dornic and his team were surprised.
“First, we were confused,” he says. “We were really excited when we became more and more aware that this event was truly exceptional.”
The signal looked promising and appeared as a bright line, almost horizontally, on the detector. Researchers believe this was created by small electron-like particles called muons, which were produced by hitting the detector and pounding neutrinos that KM3NET’s detectors could pick up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpuargix2u4
When researchers first tentatively published their results in 2024, they were still calculating the exact energy of the particles. “They were clearly surprised to see this high energy, so they didn’t think they had this energy because the neutrino simulations weren’t that high yet.” Morgan Wasco At Oxford University.
To confirm the results, researchers first carefully explain the effects of other sources that could illuminate the detector, such as neutrinos that are generated when particles charged from space, known as cosmic rays. I had to do it. Such signals are thought to exceed higher energy neutrinos from more distant cosmic sources from 1 billion to 100 million.
Now they calculated that the energy of the neutrino has an energy of 120 peta electron volts (PEV). This is about 10 times the previous record holder discovered by the IceCube neutrino observatory in Antarctica. This PEV energy range is thousands of times more energy than the most energy particles produced by accelerators on Earth, such as the CERN’s large hadron collider.
Detecting such high-energy neutrinos provides unique insight into the events that generate them, such as black hole adhesions and supernova explosions. “The cosmic rays are charged and lose most of the original formation position as they cross interstellar space, but the neutrinos return straight,” says Wascko.
Dornic, in this case, leads to a relatively large spatial patch following the back of the neutrino, making it difficult to find the exact source, but the planned improvements of the telescope would be if you found a similarly powerful neutrino You must be able to identify the object in. future.
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