Scientists for the first time in history recorded neutrinos at the Large Hadron Collider
An international group of physicists from the FASER collaboration who work on the ATLAS detector, thanks to the use of emulsion detector, for the first time in history, neutrinos were discovered that appeared at the LHC (Large Hadron collider). It is about this unique event and further experiments that will be discussed in this material.
The Elusive Neutrino and the Search for It
Neutrinos are one of the most difficult particles in the Standard Model to observe. And the complexity of their study lies in the fact that all currently known neutrino flavors take part exclusively in gravitational and weak interactions, and that is why they are practically not scattered by other particles.
So for a neutrino with an energy of one megaeletron / volt, the path length in a solid object is 10 ^ 15 kilometers. In simple terms, such a particle can freely fly a colossal distance in a solid before randomly colliding with an atom of matter.
Also, an important feature of elusive neutrinos lies in the fact that they have an extremely small weight. So the total mass of all three neutrino flavors is not more than 0.26 electron / volt, and the most weightless neutrino supposedly has a mass of only 0.086 electron / volt. This is 6 - 7 orders of magnitude less than the mass of an element such as an electron.
In order to study these particles, special installations have been built around the world. For example, Super-Kamiokande has a detector of 50,000 tons of the purest liquid, and in such installation like IceCube uses the working fluid of the detector in the form of an ice cube with an edge length of a thousand meters.
That's just to study how neutrinos interact with other particles in an extended energy range starting from 1980s, engineers studied the possibility of fixing neutrinos that appear directly at accelerators particles.
And this year, a group of scientists working on the ATLAS detector published an analysis of the data that was collected back in 2018. So the analysis showed that for the first time in history, scientists managed to fix neutrinos that were born in the LHC.
Neutrinos with energies in teraelectron / volt appeared during the decay of hadrons, most of pions, kaons and D-mesons, which appeared as a result of collisions of protons with a total energy of the center of mass equal to 13 teraelectron / volt.
Scientists recorded this event thanks to the use of an emulsion detector, which was located 480 meters from the place of collision of particles. During the experiment, scientists were able to record six manifestations of the interaction of neutrinos with matter with a statistical significance of 2.7 standard deviations.
The scientists also reported that the work done earlier is just preparation for more large-scale experiment planned for 2022-2024, when the second large the LHC operating season.
So, according to the assumptions of physicists, during this time at the Large Hadron Collider there should be about a trillion cases of the appearance of neutrinos with a characteristic energy of one teraelectron / volt. And scientists will get about 10,000 interactions of neutrinos with matter.
The engineers want to achieve this sharp increase in the number of fixations thanks to the modification of the detector, as a result of which its weight will increase from 29 kg to 1090 kg. In addition, physicists assume that with the new detector they will be able to distinguish the interaction of all three types of neutrinos at energies that are simply physically inaccessible to other registration facilities neutrino.
Well, let's follow the successes and new discoveries of scientists at the LHC.
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