2020-12-28 21:23:58
Mysterious, elusive, elusive, mutant and ghost are some of the adjectives applied to the neutrino, a tiny elementary particle so abundant in the Universe that only photons exist in greater numbers. Every second, our own body is crossed by a multitude of them, most of them, about 600 billion, come from the Sun, others have their origin in natural radioactivity (about 50,000 million), 10,000 million come from nuclear reactors, including those that were generated in the Big Bang, they cross us without noticing (10 million) and as if that were not enough, our own bodies produce them because they contain potassium 40, a radioactive atom that continuously disintegrates emitting neutrinos.
Despite this impressive bombardment that we suffer every second, the reality is that we do not notice it in the slightest, neutrinos pass through us cleanly, what’s more, a neutrino can pass through the entire Earth without flinching, even, with a high probability, it could pass through 200 Lands, placed one after another.
Our guest today on Talking to Scientists, Mariam Tortolaresearcher at the Institute of Corpuscular Physics (IFIC) and professor at the University of Valencia, tells during the interview that even the great scientist Wolfgang Pauli, the person who theoretically proposed the existence of this particle in 1930, to explain conservation of energy during the radioactive disintegration of atomic nuclei, commented : “I have done something terrible. I have proposed an impossible-to-detect particle.”
Fortunately, the neutrino was not undetectable, as Pauli feared, although it remains an elusive particle, some of them, very few, end up interacting with matter. In 1956, the researchers Reines and Cowan detected it for the first time, although, yes, indirectly, thanks to the radiation released when a neutrino reacts with a proton inside a large tank of water.
The secret of the low interaction of the neutrino with matter lies in the fact that it is a neutral particle, with no charge, and so small that for a long time it was thought that, like the photon, it had no mass, at least that is. what the Standard Model, the bible of particle physics, preached. since the turn of the century XXIseveral experiments carried out at the facilities of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Canada and the Super-Kamiokande in Japan were shown to have mass, but very small, so much so that it has only been possible to determine that their upper limit turns out to be 500,000 times less than the mass of an electron. This discovery raised the need for new theories capable of explaining their behavior.
Mariam Tortola studies the physics of neutrinos and their properties. Today he talks about the connection of neutrinos with some of the most important problems in physics, such as the origin of dark matter or the connections between the abundance of matter and antimatter.
The experiment is being designed to answer these and other questions. DUNE which will examine the oscillations of the neutrinos as they travel. The neutrinos will be generated in the particle accelerator of the Fermilabwest of Chicago, and will be studied using two detectors, one located in the vicinity of the accelerator and the other 1,300 km away where a huge argon detector is being built underground in South DaKota.
Mariam Tórtola Baixauli, a professor at the University of Valencia, a researcher in the Group of Astroparticles and High Energy Physics and the
Institute of Corpuscular Physics, IFIC. In 2009 he received the New Researcher Award in Theoretical Physics from the Royal Spanish Physics Society and the Foundation BBVAand in 2017 the L’Oréal-UNESCO ‘For Women in Science’. I invite you to listen to it.
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