THE STARS
The origin of the chemical elements (the
atoms of which the universe is composed) was finally revealed in
detail by these three astronomers and one nuclear
physicist in 1957. Left to right, Margaret
Burbidge, Geoffrey
Burbidge, Willie
Fowler, and Fred Hoyle.
Gamow, von Weizsacker and Bethe (1937 -
39)
|
Hans Bethe (1906 - 2005) |
Ray Davis (1914 - 2006), Nobel Prize 2002 |
John Bahcall (1934 - 2005) |
The earliest
neutrino telescopes used 37Cl nuclei, which
captured neutrinos to yield 37Ar, or 71Ga
nuclei, which captured neutrinos to yield 71Ge. It
was soon realized that to get a suitably enormous detecting
volume, you should just use very pure water, and look for the
Cherenkov radiation due to neutrino-electron elastic
scattering. (Antineutrinos can also be detected, by νe-bar
+ p → n + e+.) Interest in such studies was sparked
tremendously in the 1970s when the early ongoing experiment by
Davis detected only 1/3 the predicted number of solar
neutrinos. [Since it takes around 40,000 years for a
photon to make its way from the sun's core to the surface, it
was thought possible that the
sun had gone out!] The discrepancy was, of course,
due to neutrino oscillations, which sparked interest even
more. Today, a large number of newer and larger neutrino
telescopes are constantly being planned, constructed and put
into service. The large number of astrophysical sources of
neutrinos (such as supernovae) make data from such telescopes
extremely important in astrophysics.
Underwater neutrino telescopes:
Baikal
(1993 on)
ANTARES
(2006 on)
Super
Kamiokande III (2006 on)
KM3NeT (future telescope;
under construction since 2013)
NESTOR
Project (under development since 1998)
TRIDENT (2030), at bottom of Pacific Ocean
Under-ice neutrino telescopes:
AMANDA (1996–2009, superseded by IceCube)
IceCube (2004 on)
DeepCore
and PINGU,
an existing extension and a proposed extension of IceCube.
Underground neutrino telescopes:
Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (closed 2006)
Soudan
Lab, in Soudan, Minnesota
Sanford
Underground Research Facility
The Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array
(AMANDA), buried in the ice beneath the South Pole, ultimately
became part of the IceCube observatory. IceCube, which was
completed in 2010, consists of a cubic kilometer grid of sensors
embedded below 4,900 feet (1,500 m) of ice. In Europe,
researchers are developing plans for KM3NeT, which will span 1.2
cubic miles (five cubic kilometers) in the Mediterranean Sea.
And physicists at the Baikal Neutrino Telescope in Russia's Lake
Baikal, the largest freshwater lake by volume in the world, are
planning to build the Gigaton
Volume Detector (GVD), which would be one cubic km.
Summary of Neutrino Telescopes
Worldwide
Catalog
of Exoplanets
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