Chinese scientists are working on the largest ghost particle detector in the world around 3,500 meters beneath the ocean surface.
Understanding Neutrinos
Around 100 billion ghost particles, which are called neutrinos, pass through every square centimeter of the body each second. They pass by matter almost completely unimpeded. When they move through ice or water, at times, they create byproducts known as muons that offer light flashes. By studying these flash patterns, scientists may be able to reconstruct the energy and even the source of the neutrinos.
Interestingly, their nonexistent electrical charge and close-to-zero mass makes them barely interact with other matter types.
These ghost particles are present everywhere, coming only second to photons as the universe's most abundant subatomic particles. They are also produced in stellar nuclear fire, in massive explosions of supernovae, in radioactive decay, in accelerators of particles, in cosmic rays, and in Earth's nuclear reactors.
However, they are incredibly hard to detect due to their minimal intermatter interactions. They were first found zipping from a nuclear reactor back in 1956. Several experiments that focus on detecting these particles were able to detect their steady bombardments. However, the cascade covers rarer particles that are produced when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere of the Earth.
If these neutrinos could be slowed down, physicists will be able to pick up some origins of the particles that trace back to billions of light years away.
This is where the telescope China is working on comes into play. According to Xu Donglian, who serves as the chief scientist of the project, the TRIDENT, which stands for Tropical Deep-sea Neutrino Telescope, will be able to pick up neutrinos penetrating from the Earth's opposite as it uses the Earth as a sort of shield. As the telescope nears the equator, it will be able to receive neutrinos from every direction within the Earth's rotation. This enables sky observation without having any blind spots.
World's Largest Underwater Telescope
The TRIDENT, which stands for Tropical Deep-sea Neutrino Telescope and is called Ocean Bell or "Hai ling" in Chinese, will be anchored to the Western Pacific Ocean's seabed. When it is finished by 2030, the telescope will be capable of scanning for rare light flashes made by hidden particles as they become briefly tangible within the depths of the ocean.
The telescope will have over 24,000 optical sensors in its 1,211 strings, with each one being 700 meters long. This will bob upward from the point of anchoring on the seabed.
The detector will be organized in the pattern for Penrose tiling. It will have a diameter of four kilometers. When it is functional, it will work on detecting neutrinos across 7.5 cubic kilometers.
Currently, the world's largest neutrino detector, which is the IceCube, can only monitor 1 cubic kilometer. This means that TRIDENT will boast of remarkably higher sensitivity and have a higher chance of detecting neutrinos. The IceCube is situated at Antarctica's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.
According to scientists, the TRIDENT's pilot project will start in 2026, while the complete detector will hit the virtual world in 2030.
According to researchers who outlined the detector in a paper, the TRIDENT aums to push neutrino telescope performance limits and arrive at a new sensitivity frontier for searches across the sky for astrophysical sources of neutrinos.
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