DUNE scientists observe first neutrinos with prototype detector at Fermilab

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2024/08/12/dune-scientists-observe-first-neutrinos-with-prototype-detector-at-fermilab/

by croes • 2 years ago

218 108 2 years ago

newscenter.lbl.gov

bloopernova• 2 years ago

Non-physicist question:

What purpose do neutrinos serve in the complex world of elementary particles?

Are they "just" a side effect of radioactive decay, or do they facilitate some other reaction?

(edited to change the original question from "what are neutrinos for?" to the current question which was suggested by a grandchild comment)

pif2• 2 years ago

what are neutrinos for?

I'm not sure I understand your question, sorry!

Are they "just" a side effect of radioactive decay

They are (as fas as we know) elementary particles as several other elementary particles.

do they facilitate some other reaction?

Again, I'm not sure I get the sense of your question, but I'd say no, as they are the most elusive particles we know.

gus_massa2• 2 years ago

Oversimplifiying, they are chargeless electrons.

If you have an electron(negative) and a proton (positive), then the charge may jump and you get a neutrino(no charge) and a neutron(no charge).

It's more common in the other direction. If ypu have a neutron(no charge) it splits into a proton(positive), an electron(negative) an an antineutrino(no charge).

perihelions3• 2 years ago

- "do they facilitate some other reaction?"

They are not carriers of a fundamental force, if that's what you are thinking about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_carrier

at_a_remove2• 2 years ago

Neutrinos were originally a kind of mathematical placeholder to allow for conservation of lepton number (electrons, muons, etc). Turns out that they're real! More to the point, you have six basic leptons (and their antiparticles) if you count the types of neutrinos and six basic quarks (and their antiparticles). It's an interesting parallel.

They react with very little, as it turns out. Chargeless, and so they care not for electromagnetic forces. Strong nuclear force is also a miss. Originally, it was thought that only the weak nuclear force was the way they could interact with matter, but with confirmation that they have a non-zero mass, they can also interact with gravity. This makes them both hard to detect, but also an excellent way to peer through things like clouds of interstellar dust, or through the Earth.

jfengel• 2 years ago

Even zero mass particles interact with gravity. Anything with energy does.

Having non zero mass means that at least in theory we could slow them down to get a better look at them. But so far we have no idea how, which means that we don't even know what the mass actually is. We just know from the way from the types of neutrinos observed that they can change type, and they couldn't do that if their mass were zero.

Koshkin• 2 years ago

Neutrinos can interact with atoms, producing high-energy charged particles.

nilkn• 2 years ago

Neutrinos must exist to satisfy conservation of lepton number. Specifically, the weak interaction can change flavor. In beta decay (for example), a down quark changes into an up quark, which converts a neutron into a proton and emits an electron. Conservation of lepton number implies that another particle must also be emitted with the properties of a neutrino.

mensetmanusman2• 2 years ago

They serve the same purpose as every particle field, a store of energy as it moves between forms in this waterfall of existence towards maximum entropy.

MaxikCZ• 2 years ago

Do they have purpose to us / our technology?

matja• 2 years ago

They preserve the spin quantity in particle interactions. E.g. in beta decay a spin-neutral atom has a neutron that decays into a proton and an electron. Neutrons, protons and electrons have spin 1/2, so an extra 1/2 spin came about. An anti-neutrino has spin -1/2 which is emitted to balance the spin quantity.

Iwan-Zotow• 2 years ago

What purpose do neutrinos serve in the complex world of elementary particles?

To utterly confuse physicists, no other purpose detected

perihelions3• 2 years ago

Fascinating that there's a neutrino beam cutting straight through the earth, in a chord hundreds of miles long, and they expect to be able to measure dozens of events per second (edit: at the closer of the two detectors—not the 800 mile one). If they were to modulate this beam, they could tweet-by-neutrino in near real-time.

- "DUNE is split between two locations hundreds of miles apart: A beam of neutrinos originating at Fermilab, close to Chicago, will pass through a particle detector located on the Fermilab site, then travel 800 miles through the ground to several huge detectors at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota."

- "The DUNE detector at Fermilab will analyze the neutrino beam close to its origin, where the beam is extremely intense. Collaborators expect this near detector to record about 50 interactions per pulse, which will come every second..."

pif2• 2 years ago

Fascinating that there's a neutrino beam cutting straight through the earth, in a chord hundreds of miles long

This is not the first time! Search about neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso.

perihelions3• 2 years ago

OPERA collaboration!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPERA_experiment

scheme2712• 2 years ago

The K2K experiment also sent a beam from KEK to SuperK in Japan. I think there might have been one or two other exeriments like this. If you spend the time and money to create a neutrino detector, doing an experiment like this is a reasonable add on.

JumpCrisscross4• 2 years ago

they could tweet-by-neutrino in near real-time

We demonstrated in 2012 a neutrino-based link which “achieved a decoded data rate of 0.1 bits/sec with a bit error rate of 1% over a distance of 1.035 km, including 240 m of earth” [1].

To put that into perspective, a through-the-core beam would reach its antipode about 24 milliseconds before its circumnavigating partner [2].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847

[2] assuming a spherical earth with diameter 12 756 km [a] and circumference 40,075 km [b], and thus distance difference of 7 282 km, and a speed of light of 300mm m/s

[a] https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/earth_info.htm...

[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference

shagie• 2 years ago

The relevant RFC is from (April 1st) 1991 - Memo from the Consortium for Slow Commotion Research (CSCR) https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1217.html

Section 4 deals with Jam-Resistant Underwater Communication

    The ULS system proposed in (2) above has the weakness that it is
    readily jammed by simple depth charge explosions or other sources of
    acoustic noise (e.g., Analog Equipment Corporation DUCK-TALK voice
    synthesizers linked with 3,000 AMP amplifiers).  An alternative is to
    make use of the ultimate in jam resistance: neutrino transmission.
    For all practical purposes, almost nothing (including several light-
    years of lead) will stop a neutrino.  There is, however, a slight
    cross-section which can be exploited provided that a cubic mile of
    sea water is available for observing occasional neutrino-chlorine
    interactions which produce a detectable photon burst.  Thus, we have
    the basis for a highly effective, extremely low speed communication
    system for communicating with submarines.

throwpoaster• 2 years ago

Got me curious if that's enough margin for HFT firms to invest...

lawlessone2• 2 years ago

How soon until some high speed trader figures out this would be a faster way to send some data than sending it around the earth?

temp0826• 2 years ago

I'd like to imagine this as an early step towards omnidirectional point-to-point links blasting through the planet at each other to replace the need for switching/routing.

holoduke• 2 years ago

High frequency traders pay attention please.

scionthefly• 2 years ago

Kind of makes me want to hook a multi-mode decoding radio to the output of a high efficiency (lol) neutrino detector to see if any of those extrasolar neutrinos are just interstellar packet radio...

tetris11• 2 years ago

Redhat might need to rename their orchestration product

elashri2• 2 years ago

And while we are at that. Unix communities would make a great contribution by changing "root" as the super user account convention /s. This will help physicists searching for ROOT on the web.

elashri2• 2 years ago

The concept of near and far detector for a neutrinos experiment is not new. We already have NOvA which DUNE will be its successor and probably will be able to solve the neutrinos mass hierarchy by then.

aa-jv• 2 years ago

a neutrino beam cutting straight through the earth, in a chord hundreds of miles long

In my copy of this mental image, I wondered if Earths' gravity, and indeed our movement through the cosmos, bends that chord, and what it would sound like ..

wiml• 2 years ago

Earth's gravity certainly does (though not by much); our movement through the cosmos shouldn't appreciably, since the Earth is in freefall. (But tides will affect it.)

hn727742• 2 years ago

Is there any current or potential overlap with gravity wave science like LIGO?

The article touches on black holes and supernovae. I am curious to learn more.

It will enable scientists to explore new areas of neutrino research and possibly address some of the biggest physics mysteries in the universe, including searching for the origin of matter and learning more about supernovae and black hole formation.

lnauta2• 2 years ago

This is the dream of multi-messenger astronomy:

Simulations show that next generation gravitational wave detectors will be able to detect the initial part of the wave before the actual merger of objects (or collision?). If you can identify this signal in time, you could make the 'regular' telescopes look into that particular direction and look for a signal in light, and you could use a neutrino detector at the same time (think IceCube, KM3NeT, Baikal and others that look at large parts of the sky) to look in the neutrino channel.

This way you would have gravitational wave-, light- and neutrino-channels from a single object. This is still many years (decades?) away, but would be incredible for studying exotic objects.

If you mean, measuring the neutrino baseline difference when a GW passes through the Earth, perhaps. I never thought about it, but its definitely intriguing.

hn727742• 2 years ago

If you mean, measuring the neutrino baseline difference when a GW passes through the Earth, perhaps. I never thought about it, but its definitely intriguing.

That's where my mind went. Lasers need a lot of precise controls for vibration and such, and neutrinos move through matter almost like it doesn't exist. If the emitter and detector were on opposite sides of the earth, and gravity effects the neutrinos since they have mass, would that increase the resolution of a gravity wave detection?

The multi-messenger concept is fascinating too. Seems like the volume of discover is going to keep increasing exponentially.

_hark• 2 years ago

I worked on this experiment as an undergrad ~10 years ago during my freshman year! We built a Cherenkov radiation detector, focusing magnets, and did tons of simulations.

This is all from memory, but I remember the beamline setup was to get protons from the accelerator there, smash them into a target, which produced various charged particles which could be focused with the magnets, sent down a long pipe where they would decay into neutrinos et al. Then, there's a near detector and a far detector (far detector deep underground in South Dakota). The aim is to measure the neutrino flavors at both detectors to better understand the flavor oscillations (and look for asymmetries between neutrino/anti-neutrino oscillations, hopefully to help explain the matter/antimatter asymmetry in the universe).

The particular bit I worked most on was studying the effects of adding an additional solid absorber at the end of the beamline, which was needed to absorb all the particles that didn't decay in the pipe. It would produce more neutrinos that were unfocused, so would affect the near-far flavor statistics (since these would be detected at the near detector but not the far since they were unfocused, ruining the statistics). It was a great intro to doing physics research :-)

teaearlgraycold• 2 years ago

How far away is the far detector?

fnordfnordfnord2• 2 years ago

800 miles.

https://lbnf-dune.fnal.gov/how-it-works/detectors-and-comput...

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

Fascinating. But I (non-physics person) don’t understand how the neutrinos won’t interact with atoms in the earth’s crust and their trajectory be deviated in the long journey between the 2 sites.

collinvandyck76• 2 years ago

It's a big part of what makes them hard to detect. They interact with almost nothing. (source: i'm not a physics person either, but i watch a lot of physics videos)

epgui2• 2 years ago

I believe they might, but it's all a question of how large or small the probability is. And in the case of neutrinos, my lay-person understanding is that the probability of interaction is incredibly small.

Anytime I hear about neutrino-related numbers my mind is blown. I have a hard time truly wrapping my head around these numbers... for eg.: "At the surface of the Earth, the flux is about 65 billion (6.5 × 10^10) solar neutrinos, per second per square centimeter." (wiki intro)

hnuser1234562• 2 years ago

For typical solar neutrino energies, and given Fermilab and South Dakota are about 750 miles apart, around one in 10^15 neutrinos would interact with the ground (more specifically, the nucleus of an atom in the ground).

It would take about 10^14 miles (17 light years) of solid lead to block 50% of neutrinos.

Imagine that you are a tiny, tiny, tiny neutrino. You are a million times smaller than an electron. You are drifting through space, and the only other component of space that you can interact with is the nucleus of atoms. But atoms also have electron shells that repel each other, so the nuclei have to be centered inside electron clouds that refuse to go anywhere near each other. The nucleus of each atom is only 1/25,000 the width of the electron cloud, or the "full width" of the atom.

In other words, travelling through solid lead, for neutrinos, is like flying through mostly empty space.

From the perspective of a neutrino, in solid lead, if each lead atom was centered on a star in the Milky Way galaxy, each lead nucleus would be the diameter of Jupiter's orbit. Everything else would be pure emptiness.

Continuing with this blown-up scale, you would need to fly your spaceship for 10^27 lightyears before you have a 50% chance of flying within the Jupiter orbit distance of a star.

The universe is only 10^11 light years wide, so you would need to fly through 10^16 universes before you have a 50% chance of passing within the Jupiter orbit of a star. And this is assuming the entire universe is as dense as the milky way's disk around us.

tocs3• 2 years ago

I have been watching Amazon and Alibaba for neutrino detectors. None so far.

How big is the experiment (outside distance)? It would be great to do a giant CAT scan of the Earth.

scheme2712• 2 years ago

Neutrinos don't really interact much with other matter so you need either a really intense source of neutrinos or a really big detector (think multiple tons of stuff ) or both. So you're talking about a 10m x 10m volume plus you need the detector to be in a place that doesn't get much other radiation so you need to bury it a few hundred meters underground.

dhosek3• 2 years ago

So it’s gonna be a special order from Alibaba then?

fnord77• 2 years ago

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/worlds-smallest-neutrino-det...

pjs_• 2 years ago

Thirty thousand tons of liquid argon

fnordfnordfnord2• 2 years ago

A bit more than that.

Combined, the four detector modules will hold nearly 70,000 tons of ultrapure liquid argon.

https://lbnf-dune.fnal.gov/how-it-works/detectors-and-comput...

johnea2• 2 years ago

This is super nerd interesting and everything, but does this have any real effect on everyday life?

I am very supportive of advancing science, but I just wonder if this is the top prioriy for spending in the current world...

kridsdale3• 2 years ago

Maybe one day, like faster communication through the planet. People were saying the same question you asked about radio waves only 100 years ago.

johnea2• 2 years ago

Sounds like research should start on it in another 100 years then...

dang• 2 years ago

[stub for offtopicness. you're all correct, but it's fixed now]

ceejayoz• 2 years ago

I really hope someone on the team has Atreides as a last name.

snapcaster• 2 years ago

So jealous they get to call themselves Dune scientists

hyperific• 2 years ago

Not Dune as in Arrakis, DUNE as in Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment

KSteffensen• 2 years ago

Are you absolutely sure there is no Arrakis involved in the choosing of that acronym?

CapeTheory• 2 years ago

The SPICE must flow

(Small Particles Inside the Crust of the Earth)

nntwozz• 2 years ago

May their prototype detector never chip and shatter.

cratermoon• 2 years ago

Did the automatic headline mangler change "DUNE" the acronym for "Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment" to "Dune" the name of a heap of sand and also the nickname of a planet in a fictional universe?

layer8• 2 years ago

Yes.

Apocryphon• 2 years ago

That's what it's been dune

njarboe• 2 years ago

The title would be better if the original acronym capitalization was kept. "DUNE" not "Dune". I clicked through hoping to find out about a collaboration between geomorphologists and particle physicists. Still interesting but felt like a clickbait title.

vlovich1236• 2 years ago

It always struck me as weird that proponents of the Fermi paradox use lack of radio signals as indication we're alone. Ignoring that radio signals were audible from Earth for maybe 100 years before we significantly reduced the power associated (& switched to digital) and started encrypting everything (makes everything look like noise).

Once you start to consider neutrinos as a communication medium which we're just barely scratching the surface of, or whatever future technology might be possible with advances in science and engineering, then it becomes clear we don't know what to look for on the technological front for an advanced civilization (other than knowing it's unlikely to be 1950s analog radio waves).

cthalupa4• 2 years ago

Lack of radio signals is a pretty tiny portion of the Fermi paradox. Fermi himself wasn't even thinking of them at the time according to the other Los Alamos scientists that were part of the conversation, but instead about having evidence of actual visitation. While the galaxy is mindbogglingly vast, even with the slower methods of interstellar travel that we could feasible achieve based on our current knowledge, we're talking about timeframes to traverse it that are not large on geological timescales, much less cosmological ones.

There's lots of interesting reasons to pay attention to radio signals beyond 'Aliens broadcasting TV, music, and talk radio' - lots of neat stuff has radio waves as a consequence - and since we're already listening in and interpreting that data, it's pretty cost effective for us to also look for it in a technosignature context.

But there's a reasonably wide variety of other technosignatures we actively look for today, and others that scientists attempt to infer out of data gathered for other reasons.

Also, the whole way you've phrased your comment is kind of strange. The Fermi paradox doesn't advocate the idea that we're alone - it's about the discrepancy between how ubiquitous intelligence life should be in the universe at large based on our understandings of how life came into existence and how little evidence we have that that is the case. "We weren't looking at/for the right things" would 100% be a reasonable answer to the paradox that the overwhelming majority of scientists in the related fields would take no issue with if we suddenly discovered alien life through some different technosignature than we currently look for. Something like a dyson sphere or swarm would never have come into the conversation when Fermi first proposed the question (and he wasn't the first person to ask where everybody was, either) but are now seen as plausible enough that respected scientists in the field pour over things like the Kepler data looking for evidence of them.

The Fermi paradox doesn't really need "proponents" - as long as we have no evidence of intelligent life or our understandings of how common intelligent life should be in the universe change, the paradox will stand. But I don't think there's any real faction of people that want it to stand, though. Every scientist or enthusiast on the subject I've ever spoken to or read thoughts on the subject would love to have an answer to the paradox.

vlovich1236• 2 years ago

If the probability works out to 1 intelligent civilization per galaxy on average, then we wouldn't expect any other civilizations in our neck of the woods to discover (i.e. we could be the first or at least the only currently active one in our galaxy).

If the probability works out to a few per galaxy, we don't actually know that it's possible for a civilization to practically leave their own solar system. Or it could be that in the amount of time since the Big Bang, we'd be the only ones that have had time to develop in our galaxy since the Big Bang. Or we could be the only ones to have developed in our neck of the woods for distances that aren't horribly relativistic (e.g. our furthest telescopes are looking back billions of years so who knows the current state of those places).

As for the assumption that the galaxy would be teeming with life, it's not even clear that we can ever get to Alpha Centauri in a reasonable time frame. 80 years would require an average 5% the speed of light to get there (meaning much faster peak to do accelerate halfway / decelerate halfway). That's a lot of fuel so it's a huge stretch to claim we have that technology today. A 1% speed of life average speed would be a 400 year one-way trip. And even if we do build technology capable of this and go there, does that mean that Alpha Centauri then has the resources needed to bootstrap & proceed to the next star system or does it take a long time to build up a manufacturing base in the local star system to continue on the journey (i.e. you may be able to get to 1% the speed of light to travel between systems but traveling between planets within a system might still take a long time to collect resources & build out another space port)? In other words, how quickly do we go from star system to star system colonizing? There's no reason to believe that any intelligent civilization would be immune from economic pressures similar to humanity in terms of not taking on centennial or millennial interstellar projects. And as we can tell from humans on earth, there are economic, resource, technological, & timing reasons why we don't just start firing probes out into other star systems to try to do exploration.

We also don't know how long the universe needed to cool & coalesce for before life had the appropriate conditions to evolve; it's not like life existed from the first moment Earth formed. It likely needed to exist for billions of years after the solar system coalesced & then for billions of years it was still getting pummeled by asteroids & comets within the orbital plane until it got cleared out. After all, Mars seems to have been similar in many ways but ended up dead so it's clearly a knife's edge (e.g. Jupiter protecting us from a bunch of incoming asteroids and comets).

Finally, we have no idea whether intelligent civilizations have enough resources and survive long enough to leave their star system & to remain stable continuing to explore well beyond or collapse.

And all of that isn't even touching that our ability to look for these technosignatures is extremely limited because we don't know what we're looking for, we don't know where to look for it, & we are blindly guessing at the signatures we might find.

My point is - it's not a paradox unless you make some pretty wild assumptions that have no basis for them in the first place - we have no priors to inform probabilities to determine how many civilizations to look for. Nor do we even have search criteria for where to look. And we know that some pretty crazy technology that we have no way to detect is possible. As for visitation, I think people are way too optimistic about the ease with which such problems could be solved. & even if it does, we're at the outermost arm of the galaxy. Why would we be particularly interesting for aliens to visit? e.g. what star system would we pick to visit? Probably one with more resources that we've run out of rather than one with life if we've already convinced ourselves life is abundant in the universe & uninteresting to find.

kouru225• 2 years ago

And they did it all without House Atreides too

elihu• 2 years ago

I'm far from an expert in this area, but as I understand it, neutrino and anti-neutrino detectors have some application in nuclear non-proliferation, as you can use them to identify the whereabouts of nuclear reactors, and maybe even fissile materials if your detector is close enough.

I wonder if this new neutrino detector has similar potential applications?

epgui2• 2 years ago

I'm not an expert, but that sounds unrealistic today considering how much difficulty we have making basic measurements of neutrinos.

DUNE scientists observe first neutrinos with prototype detector at Fermilab

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