In fact, of all the particles that arise from a collision in a large, powerful accelerator like the LHC, the neutrinos and antineutrinos are the only ones that aren’t captured by the detectors. Particles produced in colliders tend to go off in random directions, as these collisions occur in the center-of-momentum frame with respect to the detector. Note how even with the clear signatures and transverse tracks, there is a shower of other particles this is due to the fact that protons are composite particles, and due to the fact that dozens of proton-proton collisions occur with every bunch crossing. When unstable particles like the Z-boson, W-boson, the charged pion, or heavy leptons like the muon or tau decay, they produce neutrinos as well since they’re moving in random directions, so do the neutrinos.Ī candidate Higgs event in the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. However, because the particles to be collided are circulated in opposite directions with equal (and opposite) momenta, these collisions also produce a random, evenly distributed set of daughter particles. In particle colliders, like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, particles are smashed together at nearly the speed of light, with kinetic energies that are thousands of times the rest mass of the original particles. The difficulty inherent to detecting neutrinos isn’t restricted to nuclear reactors, either. The distribution of neutrinos spreads out just like light does: in a sphere, moving outward away from the source. The proximity was of paramount importance, because the number of neutrinos you’ll have a chance to detect drops as the inverse of the distance squared: place your detector twice as far away and you’ll only capture one-quarter of the neutrinos you’d detect otherwise place it ten times as far away and you’ll capture just one-hundredth of the neutrinos you’d capture from your closer location.
The very first neutrinos that were ever detected by humans were technically antineutrinos, detected by placing a specially made detector right next to the nuclear reactor itself. ( Credit: Centro Atomico Bariloche/Pieck Dario) The neutrinos (or more accurately, antineutrinos) first hypothesized by Pauli in 1930 were detected from a similar nuclear reactor in 1956.
Reactor nuclear experimental RA-6 (Republica Argentina 6), en marcha, showing the characteristic Cherenkov radiation from the faster-than-light-in-water particles emitted.
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