Chinese scientists are building the world’s largest “ghost particle” detector 11,500 feet (3,500 meters) below the ocean surface. The Tropical Deep Sea Neutrino Telescope (TRIDENT), called hai ling, or “ocean bell” in Chinese, will be attached to the seafloor of the western Pacific Ocean. When completed in 2030, it will look for rare flashes of light created by elusive particles that become briefly visible in the depths of the ocean.
Approximately 100 billion ghost particles every second neutrinoGo through every square inch of your body. But still, true to their spooky name, neutrinos’ lack of electric charge and near-zero mass means they don’t interact much with other types of matter.
But by slowing down neutrinos, physicists can trace the origins of some particles from ancient, catastrophic stellar explosions and galactic collisions billions of light years away.
This is where the ocean bell appears.
“Using the Earth as a shield, TRIDENT will detect neutrinos entering from the other side of the planet,” Xu Donglian, the project’s chief scientist, told reporters at a press conference on October 10. “Because TRIDENT is close to the equator, it can capture neutrinos coming from all directions along with the Earth’s rotation, allowing it to observe the entire sky without any blind spots.”
Neutrinos are everywhere; they just give way photons They are the most common subatomic particles in the universe and are formed in the nuclear fires of stars, massive supernova explosions, cosmic rays and radioactive decay, and particle accelerators and nuclear reactors on Earth.
Despite their ubiquity, their minimal interactions with other matter make neutrinos incredibly difficult to detect. They were first detected flying from a nuclear reactor in 1956, and many neutrino detection experiments observed the constant bombardment of particles sent to us from the Sun; But this cascade masks rarer neutrinos produced when cosmic rays hit Earth’s atmosphere, whose sources remain mysterious.
Neutrinos pass through most matter completely unhindered, including our entire planet, but they sometimes interact with water molecules. As neutrinos travel through water or ice, they sometimes create side particles called muons that emit bursts of light. By studying the patterns of these bursts, scientists can reconstruct the neutrino’s energy and sometimes its source.
But to increase the possibility of ghost particle interaction, the detectors need to be submerged under plenty of water or ice.
China’s new giant detector will rise from a junction on the seafloor, consisting of more than 24,000 optical sensors strung on 1,211 filaments, each 2,300 feet (700 m) long.
The detector will be arranged in a Penrose tile pattern and will be 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) in diameter. Once activated, it will scan 1.7 cubic miles (7.5 cubic kilometers) for neutrinos. IceCube, the world’s largest neutrino detector, located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, has a monitoring area of only 0.24 cubic miles (1 cubic kilometer), meaning TRIDENT will be much more sensitive and more likely to find neutrinos .
Scientists say that the pilot project will start in 2026, and the full detector will be operational in 2030. “TRIDENT aims to push the limits of neutrino telescope performance by reaching a new limit of sensitivity in the search for astrophysical neutrino sources in the sky,” the researchers wrote in a paper describing the detector published Oct. 9 in the journal Nature Astronomy. Source
Source: Port Altele
