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Neutrinos from cosmic sources are incredibly rare. If you want any real chance of detecting them you need large detectors. The neutrinos from this CERN experime
by viscanti 3y ago
Neutrinos from cosmic sources are incredibly rare. If you want any real chance of detecting them you need large detectors. The neutrinos from this CERN experiment are much more concentrated. That allows them to use much smaller detectors.
- gmadsen 3y agomy understanding is the opposite. neutrinos fill the universe similar to photons, they are just extremely hard to detect because of their weak interaction with other matter. So detections are rare, not neutrinos themselves.
- Facemelters 3y agoLight fills the universe, but a telescope will be blinded if you shine a flashlight into it.
- gmadsen 3y agoright, because of light's interaction with matter which is different from neutrinos a quick google estimates that a human has about 100 trillion neutrinos pass through their body every second, but only about 25% chance that even a single one will interact with any atom in your body over a lifetime. it is a detection issue, not a quantity issue.
- SiempreViernes 3y agoNo, the telescope will be blinded because you shine at it with a lot of the kind of photons it has been constructed to detect, the actual space filling photons are only visible in the radio band which (optical) telescopes don't see and so aren't bothered with. The situation with neutrinos is exactly analogous: IceCube looks for high energy cosmic neutrinos, not low energy background neutrinos. The latter are only of interest to dark matter searches.
- gmadsen 3y agoits really not though. Detection is fundementally different. Neutrinos have no electric charge. the only thing you have to work with is the weak interaction. you have to literally wait for the low probability event of a neutrino-neuclei collision or detect by a second hand effect.
- SiempreViernes 3y agoDude, the only important difference is the interaction cross section, in practice virtually all particle detections happen via secondary effects: for example CCD chips also observe the secondary interaction effect (of a electron being kicked out), and with gamma ray detectors you often don't see the entire secondary effect because the photon exists the detector before being fully absorbed.