“This discovery is exciting in and of itself, but it really is just step zero. “This is useful not just for studying the fundamental properties of neutrinos themselves, but also using their interactions to constrain our knowledge of nuclear physics, the Standard Model and possible extensions beyond the Standard Model,” said team member Grayson Rich, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina. Physicists are excited about the discovery because careful measurements of coherent elastic scattering could be a powerful tool for testing the limits of the Standard Model, physicists’ best guess at an overarching mathematical description of the Universe. In comparison, the world’s most famous neutrino observatories are equipped with thousands of tons of detector material. The detector built by the team measures about 13 inches long and 4 inches wide, and weighs only 32 pounds (14.5 kg). To detect that bit of tiny recoil, the scientists figured out that a cesium iodide crystal doped with sodium was the perfect material. Making a detector out of heavy elements such as iodine, cesium or xenon dramatically increases the probability for this mode of neutrino interaction, compared to other processes.īut there’s a trade-off, since the tiny nuclear recoils that result become more difficult to detect as the nucleus grows heavier. When a neutrino bumps into the nucleus of an atom, it creates a tiny, barely measurable recoil. As a result, smaller but extremely sensitive detectors can be more effective.” “Scattering interactions occur much more often, but are also much lower in magnitude, than some of the other behaviors. “But detecting coherent elastic scattering is a little different from detecting other types of neutrino interactions.” “Larger neutrino detectors are usually better for spotting these particles because they simply have more matter for the neutrinos to interact with, making it that much more likely that they will be able to catch at least one of the rare events,” said Duke Professor Kate Scholberg, spokesperson for the COHERENT collaboration. More than four decades later, the COHERENT collaboration built the world’s smallest neutrino detector to observe the elusive interaction - called coherent elastic scattering - for the first time. In 1974, Fermilab physicist Daniel Freedman predicted a novel way for neutrinos to interact with matter. Neutrinos, miniscule subatomic particles that rarely interact with matter, are often described as ‘ghost-like.’Ĭhargeless and nearly without mass, trillions of neutrinos pass through our bodies every second, but we have no way feeling them. Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering.
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