A Breakthrough in Neutrino
Detection
As I delved through news articles, not many interested me until I
found this piece in Science America about the sun and what it is creating. For
many years there has been theoretical speculation about a particle referred to as
a Neutrino. Not until now has there been any proof of their existence. In Italy at the Gran Sasso National laboratory
scientists have gathered evidence about these particles through work on their newly
developed device, known as the Neutrino Detector. The breakthrough observation is referred to
as the Borexino experiment (See fig 1).
Fig .1 The Borexino Neutrino Detector
sphere
Neutrinos are a fusion of two protons created in the sun. They are
similar to an electron but have no electrical charge and a mass almost equivalent
to zero. They barely interact with matter and are very hard to detect. The earth should be covered in neutrinos, in fact
calculations suggest about 420 billion of these particles stream from the sun
onto every square centimeter of our planet’s surface each second. Neutrinos
just slide through the atoms of every object on earth including our bodies.
They will occasionally knock an electron loose from an atom and this will cause
a small emission of light that can be measured by the neutrino detector which
then generates data about the activity and composition of the particle
The Borexino Neutrino detector is a large sphere filled with
liquid that emits light following collisions between neutrinos and atoms. Shielding the sphere are photo multiplier
tubes that allow the device to capture the emitted light. These particle
reactions are thought to be the first step in the chain responsible for 99
percent of the energy the sun radiates. With
this new information it is anticipated we will learn a great deal more about
our sun and the wider universe.
Wick Haxton, a physicist at the University of
California, recently said, “The existence
(of Neutrinos) was not in question, only whether some group was capable of
building such an exquisitely pristine detector to see these low-energy
neutrinos in real time”.
BY Brodie Feeney
Nice job with the whole research. You did a very nice job on using the scientific terminology and you were able to keep it interesting all the way from the beginning to end. Also something well done was you used a lot of detail about the event you researched. Something you could have just added to the paper was to add hyperlinks to the website. Apart from that small note, everything else was very well done! :)
ReplyDeleteGood Job Brodie! I liked how you used the news story but still made it in your own words. You also choose a really interesting topic, especially to me, because anything in space fascinates me. Another thing that I liked was how you summarized it well so it doesn't take ages to read while still getting all of the important and neccessary information. Great job! :D
ReplyDeleteGood job on the topic, it was a very hard topic to tackle but you did it anyways. So I give you props for that. You were also very descriptive about what the neutrino does and functions, what neutrinos are and what they do.
ReplyDelete