Posted by JR88 on 08-27-2004 at09:40:
Berger can you explain this??
BooNE will investigate the question of neutrino mass by searching for neutrino oscillations from muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos. This will be done by directing a muon neutrino beam into the MiniBooNE detector and looking for electron neutrinos. This experiment is motivated by the oscillation results reported by the LSND experiment at Los Alamos.
By changing the muon neutrino beam into an anti-neutrino beam, BooNE can explore oscillations from muon anti-neutrinos to electron anti-neutrinos. A comparison between neutrino and anti-neutrino results will tell us about CP- and CPT-violation.
or this..............
On an ordinary day in Centerville, USA, two strangers, Jones and Smith, pass through town. Mr. Jones pulls up to the Centerville Motel and books a room for the night, chatting with the desk clerk as he signs the guest book and checks in. On the clerk's recommendation, he eats dinner — steak and fries, with a side of salad — at the Centerville Grille. Mr. Jones is the outgoing type, and by the time he leaves the restaurant, he has made the acquaintance not only of the waiter but of the couple at the table next to his. After dinner, they all stop for a drink at the Centerville Tap. In the morning, Mr. Jones pays his motel bill with a credit card, fills up with premium at the Centerville Service Station, buys the paper at the drug store, and has the Farmhouse Special breakfast at the Centerville Diner before moving down the road.
Mr. Smith, on the other hand, is a loner. He drives through town on the freeway, not even slowing down for the Centerville exit.
You are a detective. You have come to Centerville to track down Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith. Which one will be easier to trace? Clearly, you will have no problem discovering Mr. Jones's activities, because he interacted with at least a dozen different people in Centerville. But it will be almost impossible to learn about Mr. Smith, because he interacted with no one. No one even knows he passed through. We are known by our interactions.
Neutrinos are the Mr. Smiths of the universe. They sail through space, through walls, through planets, never even slowing down. Every minute, trillions of solar neutrinos flit through our bodies at nearly the speed of light. When they have passed through, they leave no trace, because they almost never interact with other particles. They are the loners of the particle world.
There are many particle candidates for the role of Mr. Jones. When they encounter other particles, they interact with them, sometimes beneficially and at other times in ways that damage those they encounter. But because neutrinos almost never interact, they can do no harm.
Detecting Neutrinos
The same "loner" characteristics that make neutrinos harmless also make them very hard to detect and to study. The MINOS experiment will try to get a better understanding of neutrinos by forcing a few of them to pull off the expressway — to interact inside a detector — by putting five thousand tons of iron in their path. Most of the neutrinos from the source beam will cruise right through the iron of the detector without slowing down; but a very few will stop and sign the guest book. From those few, experimenters hope to learn more about the characteristics of these elusive particles.
The experiment will use a beam of neutrinos from Fermilab, 40 miles west of Chicago. The beam will pass beneath northern Illinois and Wisconsin on its split-second trip to the detector, deep in a former iron mine in Soudan, Minnesota. Because it can pass through the earth essentially without interacting, the beam will not need a tunnel, and it will have no potential for causing harm in its path. In fact, if a person could stand directly in the beam for a million years, the number of interactions that took place in that person's body would cause no harm.
The Mr. Joneses of the world may bring good or bad to those they meet, but the Mr. Smiths have no effect at all, because they are only passing though.
just wondering........I work at a high-energy physics facility and have no idea what the heck is going on around me.
All I know is we have this thingy called a "Particle Acclerator" that spins atoms around a 4.5 mile ring and smashes them together essential creating a controlled nuclear explosion from which they gather data to try and prove many theroies, one of which is that man was created with the "Big Bang".
Du-hu-huuuuuuuuuuude!
