• Question: what does the Super-Kamiokade do??

    Asked by codmw3xbox to Ben on 14 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      What doesn’t it do! It detects the most ghostly of the building blocks of Nature called neutrinos. A neutrino enters the massive tank and interacts with the water to produce a charged particle such as an electron. This charged particle then produces a flash of light (because it is travelling faster than light can in the water) which is picked up by light sensitive electronics. From the pattern of light that is cast on the wall of the tank we can tell what type of neutrino interacted and how much energy it had.

      Neutrinos come from many many sources and Super Kamiokande can detect most of these; The Sun, supernova deaths of massive stars, cosmic rays and man made neutrinos beams.

      If you want to more about Super Kamiokande check out my blog posts:

      More on Super-K http://bit.ly/NuBlogSK
      Faster than light, how the particles produce light http://neutrinoscience.blogspot.com/2010/11/faster-than-light.html
      Hunting neutrinos at Super-K (what a neutrino ‘looks’ like) http://neutrinoscience.blogspot.com/2011/05/hunting-neutrinos-at-super-kamiokande.html

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