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And so, I continue with my obsession about neutrinos. A new article details detection of neutrinos emitted by high-energy sources by the IceCube experiment in Antarctica. IceCube looks for neutrino-induced emissions from a gigaton of ice at the South Pole (they have a lot of that stuff lying around).
Briefly, neutrinos are the companion particles of the known leptons, the electron, the muon, and the tau particle. If one of these neutrinos collides with some other particle in a water molecule in the ice, it can produce its complement particle (an electron neutrino produces an electron, a muon neutrino produces a muon, and so on). The newly produced particle produces flashes of light in the ice, which are picked up in detectors placed in the ice. The pattern of flashes makes it possible to identify the type of particle produced. An electron produced by an energetic neutrino shows up as an expanding ball of light; the energetic electron, which does not decay, will continue to bang around in the ice until it achieves thermal energies. An energetic muon, which has a half-life of 1.53 microseconds, makes a track hundreds of meters long before it decays. Finally, the tau particle, which has a very short half-life (2.9×10-13 seconds), will produce two spheres of light, the first at the creation of the tau particle, and the second at its decay. The trick is that because of its short lifetime, the two balls very nearly overlap most of the time. Researchers used machine learning to filter through years of data to find candidate tau particle events.
With these computational tools, the team managed to extract seven strong candidate tau neutrinos from about 10 years of data. These taus had higher energies than even the most powerful particle accelerators on Earth, which means they must be from astrophysical sources, such as black holes.
Pretty exciting, I thought.
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Dr. Sarah Adams is a scientist and science communicator who makes complex topics accessible to all. Her articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
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