South Korea · Wired
Inside the Experimental Traps Scientists Set for Ghostly Neutrinos
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Seventy years ago, the physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines took a custom-built 10-ton detector, surrounded it with thick lead walls and wet sandbags, and placed it near a powerful nuclear reactor at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina.
Key facts
- Seventy years ago, the physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines took a custom-built 10-ton detector, surrounded it with thick lead walls and wet sandbags, and placed it near a powerful nuclear
- Then in 1930, the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed a radical solution: A virtually undetectable particle was silently carrying the missing energy away
- Deep in the Kamioka mine in Japan, Masatoshi Koshiba built a different kind of detector called Kamiokande, which used 3 million liters of ultrapure water
- The massive device that Cowan and Reines deployed in early 1956 was meant to find what Pauli thought was impossible
Summary
More than a quarter of a century before, physicists had been puzzling over why energy appeared to be lost during a radioactive process called beta decay. Then in 1930, the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed a radical solution: A virtually undetectable particle was silently carrying the missing energy away. The massive device that Cowan and Reines deployed in early 1956 was meant to find what Pauli thought was impossible. Attention then shifted to a broader question. If nuclear reactions produce neutrinos, could they use them to peer at the nuclear fireworks inside stars, including the sun? In the 1960s, Raymond Davis Jr.