• Question: How do you find the neutrinos?

    Asked by to Linda on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by , .
    • Photo: Linda Cremonesi

      Linda Cremonesi answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Hi hainf005 and clewb005, that’s a really smart question actually!

      As I said in my profile, neutrinos are really tiny and they are everywhere and they almost never interact with anything, so… how do we detect them?
      In my experiment, we built a big detector to do it. Our detector is a big tank of water (how big? well, it’s almost 50 meters high, so let’s say that Godzilla should be able to fit in it!) and we put this tank in a mine inside a mountain (there are 1000 meters of rock above our “Godzilla”).

      In this very big tank of water every now and then a neutrino will interact with the water and produce a cone of light that we can see! Every time there is a cone of light in our tank, we know that a neutrino passed through!

      We need to go deep underground because we want to protect our detector from everything that happen on our Earth surface and would interfere with the experiment.

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