Neutrinos are those tiny weird things in the Universe that physicists call “ghost particles”. These subatomic particles are practically everywhere, and they pass right through objects. Neutrinos also don’t carry any electrical charge, nor can they be captured using magnetic or electric forces.
Physicists are now super-excited about a major milestone that was achieved at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Candidate neutrinos had been found at the high-energy particle collider for the first time, according to ScienceAlert.com.
The neutrino subdetector FASERnu enters the scene
The neutrino subdetector FASERnu was used for detecting six neutrino interactions. The achievement could mean even a lot more than you might be tempted to believe.
Jonathan Feng of the University of California Irvine, who’s also co-leader of the FASER Collaboration, declared:
Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider,
This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the Universe.
The scientists now seem very optimistic when it comes to future possibilities, and that can only delight us all as well.
David Casper from the University of California, co-leader of FASER, declared:
Given the power of our new detector and its prime location at CERN, we expect to be able to record more than 10,000 neutrino interactions in the next run of the LHC, beginning in 2022,
We will detect the highest-energy neutrinos that have ever been produced from a human-made source.
As its name suggests, a neutrino is electrically neutral. We’re also talking about a fermion that interacts only through gravity and weak interaction. The mass of a neutrino is very small – so small that it was long thought to be zero.
The new research was published in Physical Review D.
