On Wednesday, a team of researchers announced they were extremely fortunate. The team is building detectors on a Mediterranean bed where neutrinos can identify these rare opportunities when they happen to interact with nearby seawater. And although the detector was only 10% of its size when it was completed, it was able to pick up the most energetic neutrino ever detected.
For context, the largest hadron collider, the most powerful particle accelerator on the planet, accelerates protons to 7-tera-electron type (TEV) energy. The detected neutrino had at least 60 PETA-ELECTRONVOLTS energy, which hit a presumably 230 PEV. It also blew past records that were close to 10 PEVs.
Attempts to chase neutrinos into sources make it clear that there are many candidate sources in the more distant universe, but that they were born outside our galaxy.
Search for neutrinos
Neutrinos are well known for not wanting to do anything as long as they are famous. It is estimated that since they rarely interact with normal substances, it is necessary to have a light-year lead to completely block their bright sources. Each of us is passing through us every second trillion neutrinos, but there are less than five neutrinos that actually interact with our body problems in our lives.
The only reason we can detect them is that they are produced in astounding quantities by nuclear reactions, such as the fusions that are taking place in solar and nuclear power plants. We also stack the decks by making sure that many problems are available for neutrinos to interact.
One more successful implementation of the “many material” approach is the IceCube detector in Antarctica. Neutrinos arriving from space rely on the fact that when they hit Antarctica ice, many particles and light are produced. So the team drilled holes in the ice, placed the detector strings to pick up the light, and reconstructed the arrival of the neutrinos.
