Posts

Showing posts with the label Detector

A mission concept to fly a solar neutrino detector close to the sun

Image
This is one of the new images of the Sun from ESA’s Solar Orbiter’s closest approach on March 26, 2022. Credit: ESA Astronomers have proposed a concept mission to fly a neutrino observatory into orbit around the sun to get a better picture of what’s going on in the sun’s core. Astronomers have very few tools to peer into the heart of the sun. Fortunately, the constant nuclear reactions taking place in the sun’s core as hydrogen combine to form helium release a relentless flood of neutrinos. Neutrinos are tiny, ghost-like particles that almost never interact with matter. On Earth we’ve built giant detectors to catch the occasional neutrino. Astronomers have used these neutrinos to understand the nuclear processes taking place inside the sun and to probe the edges of known physics. But our observatories on Earth are basically limited because our planet is so far from the sun. So what if we took the neutrino observatory into space? A te

MIT is building a time-traveling dark matter detector

Image
A team of physicists at MIT recently published a stunning research paper detailing their successful attempt to use entanglement and ‘quantum time reversal’ to create sensors capable of taking very deep measurements. It sounds like a lot of science jargon, but the point is this could potentially lead to a legitimate ‘dark matter detector’, and it’s something that could revolutionize humanity’s understanding of everything . In advance: Physics is a moving target. Because we are like fish in an aquarium, we don’t know where the water we are swimming is coming from or what lies behind the blurry shadows on the edge of our glass-paneled horizon. Regards, humanoids Subscribe to our newsletter now for weekly recaps of our favorite AI stories in your inbox. To try to define our reality, we use the scientific method, the human imagination, and a lot of mathematics. But in the end, any theory is only as good as its ability to work with complementary theories. Albert Einstein, for example, spe

New Super-Sensitive Dark Matter Detector Booted

Image
The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experimental team has announced the results of its first scientific test today; the experiment is the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector, and although it didn’t find any dark matter in this first round, the team confirmed that the experiment worked as expected. The LZ experimental detector consists of nested liquid xenon tanks, each 1.5 meters high and 1.5 meters wide, buried beneath North Dakota. The idea is that a dark matter particle streaking through space will eventually bounce off one of the xenon atoms, knocking the electron loose in the instant the experiment recorded. The tank is buried about a mile below the earth’s surface to minimize the amount of background noise. Today’s announcement comes after 60 days of live data collection that ran from December 25 to May 12. “We are looking for very, very low energy recoil by particle physics standards. This is a very, very rare process, if seen at all,” Hugh Lippincott, a physicist at UC Santa Barba