The Hunt for Neutrinos (The Super Kamiokande Detector)
Channel: Everything Science
Date: 2020-08-16

The Hunt for Neutrinos (The Super Kamiokande Detector):
Half a mile under Mount Ikeno in Japan sits the Super Kamiokande Neutrino Detector. It's here that physicists are hoping to capture elusive neutrinos that might give us hints about our universes past and now, with a major upgrade (gadolinium) scientists are hoping to see neutrinos from billions of years in the past.

What are neutrinos?
Neutrinos (not spelled nutrino) are neutral subatomic particles 1 and a half million times lighter than an electron and 10 billion, billion, billion times lighter than a grain of sand. They were formed in the first second of the universe’s creation before even the first atoms were formed. Born from violent astrophysical events like exploding stars and gamma-ray bursts, they are fantastically abundant in the universe and can move as easily through lead as we move through the air.

The hunt for neutrinos began in 1930 when the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli predicted the existence of a neutral particle that was emitted during nuclear decay. In doing the math, Pauli discovered that when an electron was given off from radioactive decay, there was a small hole in the system’s total mass/energy balance. And this was a very small hole. And keep in mind, a neutrino is a million and a half times lighter than an electron, so many would doubt these findings, chalking it up to a rounding error.

But Pauli knew something was missing and he predicted that it was an unknown, ghostly particle, non-charged particle. But Pauli struggled over his discovery of a particle he would have no way of detecting. After all, how would you detect something nearly massless and that didn't have a charge?
 
Videoclips from within the detector are marked by who produced them and used under YouTube's Fair Use policy.

#Neutrinos #SuperKamiokandeDetector #Nutrino

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