Researchers studying data from the IceCube neutrino observatory buried deep in the Antarctic ice believe they may have discovered tau neutrinos, subatomic particles that come from space. These seven candidate signals appear in 9.7 years of observational data, demonstrating just how elusive these small particles can be.
According to the observatory, approximately 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second.they are The lightest particle we know They have mass and are fundamental, meaning they are not made of smaller physical building blocks.Findings from the collaboration will be published in Physical Review Letters and are Currently hosting on the preprint server arXiv.
Physicist Doug Cowen said: “The detection of seven candidate tau neutrino events in the data, combined with the expected very low background amounts, allows us to conclude that it is extremely unlikely that the background conspired to produce seven tau Neutrino impostor.” One of the study’s lead authors, Penn State University Released by Ice Cube. “The discovery of astrophysical tau neutrinos also strongly confirms IceCube’s earlier discovery of diffuse astrophysical neutrino fluxes.”
I know: What exactly is “diffuse astrophysics neutrino flux”?? This refers to the dense stream of neutrinos coming from deep in space, far beyond our relatively small cosmic neighbor, the Milky Way.This stream consists mainly of electrons and tau neutrinos, and A small proportion of muon neutrinos.
Particles from deep space come in many shapes and sizes, but most are very, very small. To their credit, neutrinos have been directly observed. others, Just like the hypothetical axionremains elusive and, if proven to exist, could be the source of at least some of the dark matter in the universe.
IceCube consists of long cables that string together more than 5,000 light-sensitive devices that detect rare flashes of blue light that occur when neutrinos interact with molecules in the Antarctic ice. The chance that background noise disrupts the tau neutrino signal is less than 1 in 3.5 million, Cowan said. Their new discovery “rules out the possibility that astrophysics doesn’t exist” [tau neutrinos] exist [5-sigma] level,” the team reports. Basically, you can think of tau neutrinos as extremely rare, but they do exist.
Fermilab is building its own neutrino detector One mile below Lead City, South Dakota. The detectors, collectively known as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (or DUNE), will be located nearly a mile below the Earth’s surface, with the first detector expected to be operational in 2029.
IceCube has been working under Antarctica for more than a decade, so DUNE needs to catch up. But two neutrino detector experiments are better than one, so this is another decade of discovery.
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