Researchers Bjorn Scholz (left) and Grayson Rich (right) with the world’s smallest neutrino detector as it’s being installed along ‘neutrino alley’ at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Credit: Juan Collar/University of Chicago
Physicists play leading role in confirming theory predicted 4 decades ago. In 1974, a Fermilab physicist predicted a new way for ghostly particles called neutrinos to interact with matter. More than four decades later, a UChicago-led team of physicists built the world’s smallest neutrino detector to observe the elusive interaction for the first time. Neutrinos are a challenge to study because their interactions with matter are so rare. Particularly elusive has been what’s known as coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, which occurs when a neutrino bumps off the nucleus of an atom.
The international COHERENT Collaboration, which includes physicists at UChicago, detected the scattering process by using a detector that’s small and lightweight enough for a reseacher to carry. Their findings, which confirm the theory of Fermilab’s Daniel Freedman, were reported Aug. 3 in the journal Science.
When a neutrino bumps into the nucleus of an atom, it creates a tiny, barely measurable recoil. Making a detector out of heavy elements such as iodine, cesium or xenon dramatically increases the probability for this new mode of neutrino interaction, compared to other processes. But there’s a trade-off, since the tiny nuclear recoils that result become more difficult to detect as the nucleus grows heavier. To detect that bit of tiny recoil, Collar and colleagues figured out that a cesium iodide doped with sodium was the perfect material. The discovery led the scientists to jettison the heavy, gigantic detectors common in neutrino research for one similar in size to a toaster.
The 4-inch-by-13-inch detector used to produce the Science results weighs only 32 pounds (14.5 kilograms). In comparison, the world’s most famous neutrino observatories are equipped with thousands of tons of detector material. “You don’t have to build a gigantic laboratory around it,” said UChicago doctoral student Bjorn Scholz, whose thesis will contain the result reported in the Science paper. “We can now think about building other small detectors that can then be used, for example to monitor the neutrino flux in nuclear power plants. You just put a nice little detector on the outside, and you can measure it in situ.”
Neutrino physicists, meanwhile, are interested in using the technology to better understand the properties of the mysterious particle. “Neutrinos are one of the most mysterious particles,” Collar said. “We ignore many things about them. We know they have mass, but we don’t know exactly how much.”
Through measuring coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, physicists hope to answer such questions. The COHERENT Collaboration’s Science paper, for example, imposes limits on new types of neutrino-quark interactions that have been proposed. The results also have implications in the search for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. WIMPs are candidate particles for dark matter. “What we have observed with neutrinos is the same process expected to be at play in all the WIMP detectors we have been building,” Collar said.
The COHERENT Collaboration, which involves 90 scientists at 18 institutions, has been conducting its search for coherent neutrino scattering at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The researchers installed their detectors in a basement corridor that became known as “neutrino alley.” This corridor is heavily shielded by iron and concrete from the highly radioactive neutron beam target area, only 20 meters (less than 25 yards) away.
This neutrino alley solved a major problem for neutrino detection: It screens out almost all neutrons generated by the Spallation Neutron Source, but neutrinos can still reach the detectors. This allows researchers to more clearly see neutrino interactions in their data. Elsewhere they would be easily drowned out by the more prominent neutron detections. The Spallation Neutron Source generates the most intense pulsed neutron beams in the world for scientific research and industrial development. In the process of generating neutrons, the SNS also produces neutrinos, though in smaller quantities.
The development of a compact neutrino detector brings to fruition an idea that UChicago alumnus Leo Stodolsky, SM’58, PhD’64, proposed in 1984. Stodolsky and Andrzej Drukier, both of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Germany, noted that a coherent detector would be relatively small and compact, unlike the more common neutrino detectors containing thousands of gallons of water or liquid scintillator. In their work, they predicted the arrival of future neutrino technologies made possible by the miniaturization of the detectors. https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2017/08/03/worlds-smallest-neutrino-detector-observes-elusive-interactions-particles
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