![]() "If there’s a supernova, a star that collapses into itself and turns into a black hole," Dr Yoshi Uchida of Imperial College London told Business Insider. "A neutrino could pass through a hundred light-years of steel without even slowing down." "Matter poses no obstacle to a neutrino," he says. Neutrinos can be very hard to detect, so much so that Neil deGrasse dubbed them "the most elusive prey in the cosmos." In this video, he explains that the detection chamber is buried deep within the earth to stop other particles from getting in. Business Insider spoke to three scientists about how the giant gold chamber works - and the dangers of conducting experiments inside it. Studying these particles is helping scientists detect dying stars and learn more about the universe. Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles which travel through space and pass through solid matter as though it were air. Super-Kamiokande (or "Super-K" as it's sometimes referred to) is a neutrino detector. Hidden 1,000 metres under Mount Ikeno in Japan is a place that looks like a supervillain's dream. The detector is full of ultra-pure water, which can leach the nutrients out of your hair and dissolve metal. Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles that pass through us all the time, and studying them can tell us about supernovas and the composition of the universe. The Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector is a physics experiment the size of a 15-storey building, buried under a mountain in Japan. Kamiokande’s observations of the 1987 supernova marked the beginning of a new science – neutrino astronomy – and Super-Kamiokande was set to follow this tradition.Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institute for Cosmic Ray Research), The University of Tokyo This detector used 1000 photomultipliers and a 300 tonne water target. The initial goal of that experiment was to search for signs of proton decay (the “-nde” suffix is short for “nucleon decay experiment”). The Hamamatsu R3600 photomultiplier tubes were first used in Kamiokande, the current detector’s predecessor, which was built in the same underground mine in the early 1980s. Routine maintenance at Super-Kamiokande, showing the size of the photomultiplier. The chain implosion caused around 8000 tubes to be destroyed, and it also wreaked havoc with the detector infrastructure. The instrumentation at the top of the detector survived. Most of the photomultipliers are deployed in the inner detector to pick up the flashes of light created when neutrinos interact with the water.Īpparently, a tube, probably near the bottom of the detector, imploded and set off a chain reaction, destroying much of the detector to a depth of about 2 m below the water level. Super-Kamiokande as it once was.Ī Japan-Korea-US collaboration, the Super-Kamiokande detector uses 50,000 tonnes of pure water as a neutrino target 1000 m below ground. The water target is 40 m high and monitored by 11,200, 50 cm diameter Hamamatsu R3600 photomultiplier tubes, and it is divided into a 32,000 tonne inner detector where the events are logged, and an 18,000 tonne outer volume to screen off unwanted effects. ![]() These results had been a major influence on physics thinking, and researchers were eagerly looking towards more. The detector also provided key benchmarks for solar neutrinos. Recent results showed that synthetic muon-type neutrinos from KEK do not always show up as expected. The detector began physics operation in 1996 and had produced important results, monitoring particles from the Sun, from cosmic-ray interactions in the atmosphere and from the Japanese KEK laboratory 250 km away. It happened as the detector was being refilled with water after routine maintenance. ![]() The extent of the damage suggested some kind of chain reaction in the tubes, with one implosion setting off the next. On 12 November, as reported briefly in CERN Courier, several thousand large photomultiplier tubes imploded in the huge Super-Kamiokande underground neutrino detector in Japan. (Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo.) Debris at the bottom of the Super-Kamiokande detector.
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