How does the Super-Kamiokande work?

How does the Super-Kamiokande work?

The Super-Kamiokande detects electrons knocked off a water molecule producing a flash of blue Cherenkov light, and these are produced both by neutrinos and antineutrinos. A rarer instance is when an antineutrino interacts with a proton in water to produce a neutron and a positron.

Can you visit Super-Kamiokande?

From the viewpoint of safety management in the mine, individual tours are not permitted as a general rule. However, for educational and research-related organizations, visits may be accepted after coordination.

Where is the Super-Kamiokande experiment?

Super-Kamiokande is located 1000 m underground in the Kamioka mine, Gifu prefecture, Japan. The horizontal entrance tunnel leads us to the experimental area through 1.7 km drive, which allows us to access the detector for 24 h for maintenance.

How deep is the Kamioka Observatory?

Buried 1 kilometer underground near the city of Hida in central Japan is an enormous cylinder 40 meters tall and filled with 50 million liters of water.

How do you catch neutrinos?

A neutrino is able to react with an atom of gallium-71, converting it into an atom of the unstable isotope germanium-71. The germanium was then chemically extracted and concentrated. Neutrinos were thus detected by measuring the radioactive decay of germanium.

How do people detect neutrinos?

So how do you detect a neutrino? One common way is to fill a big tank with water. We know light slows down through water, and if a neutrino with enough energy happens to knock into an electron, the electron will zip through the water faster than the light does.

Why was Super Kamiokande built?

The enormous size of the Hyper-Kamiokande (Hyper-K) will enable it to detect unprecedented numbers of neutrinos produced by various sources — including cosmic rays, the Sun, supernovae and beams artificially produced by an existing particle accelerator.

Can you visit Kamioka Observatory?

The entrance to KamiokaLab. Admission is free. The unusually named Kamiokande and Super Kamiokande observatories gained international renown first in 2002, when Koshiba Masatoshi won the Nobel Prize for physics for his discoveries there, and then again in 2015, when Kajita Takaaki was similarly honored.

What is a neutrino burst?

Supernova neutrinos are produced when a massive star collapses at the end of its life, ejecting its outer mantle in an explosion. Wilson’s delayed neutrino explosion mechanism has been used for 30 years to explain core collapse supernova.

Who solved the solar neutrino problem?

The solar neutrino problem was solved on June 18, 2001 [1] by a team of collaborative Canadian, American, and British scientists. The results came from an experiment in a detector full of 1,000 tons of heavy water (D2O, or wa- ter composed of deuterium in place of hydrogen.

Why are neutrino detectors built deep underground?

If the detector tank was above ground, millions of cosmic ray interactions would easily drown out the rare neutrino signals. But with the detector deep underground, cosmic rays are stopped by interactions with Earth’s atoms while neutrinos pass right through to leave their mark in the detector.

Why do neutrinos oscillate?

Neutrino oscillation arises from mixing between the flavor and mass eigenstates of neutrinos. That is, the three neutrino states that interact with the charged leptons in weak interactions are each a different superposition of the three (propagating) neutrino states of definite mass.

Where is the largest observatory in the United States?

Keck Observatory, astronomical observatory located near the 4,200-metre (13,800-foot) summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on north-central Hawaii Island, Hawaii, U.S. Keck’s twin 10-metre (394-inch) telescopes, housed in separate domes, constitute the largest optical telescope system of the burgeoning multi- …

Where is the world’s highest telescope observatory?

The highest astronomical observatory is the University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory, located at an altitude of 5,640 m (18,503 ft) on the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in a scientific reserve called Atacama Astronomical Park, Chile.

Where is the world’s highest observatories located?

Among the largest, best developed, and most renowned of these high altitude sites is the Mauna Kea Observatory located near the summit of a 4,205 m (13,796 ft) volcano in Hawaii, which has grown to include over a dozen major telescopes during the four decades since it was founded.

Can neutrinos hurt you?

Neutrinos are incredibly safe. Most neutrinos pass through matter without ever interacting. They are very small and neutral (they have no charge), so they don’t often come into contact with other particles. Neutrinos don’t emit radiation or harm the materials they travel through.

Can anything block neutrinos?

And now it’s been proven experimentally, by scientists working with data at the IceCube detector at Earth’s South Pole, that very energetic neutrinos can, in fact, be blocked. Doug Cowen at Penn State University was a collaborator on the study.

What are neutrinos good for?

Neutrinos have the potential to do amazing things like speed up global communication, detect the presence of nuclear weapons, and even confirm the presence of elusive dark matter.

How deep is the IceCube Neutrino Observatory?

IceCube, the South Pole neutrino observatory, is a cubic-kilometer particle detector made of Antarctic ice and located near the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. It is buried beneath the surface, extending to a depth of about 2,500 meters.

How high is the Mcdonald observatory?

The Visitors Center is located at 6,235 ft. above sea level, and some portions of our public programs may take place at elevations around 6,800 ft. Some people experience varying symptoms related to altitude sensitivity.

How big is the telescope at Mcdonald observatory?

Constructed 1966-68, the Smith Telescope has a 2.7-meter (107-inch) mirror, which was the third largest in the world when built. The telescope is used every clear night of the year.

How high up is the observatory?

Griffith Observatory
Elevation	1,135 ft (346 m)
Construction started	June 20, 1933
Inaugurated	May 14, 1935
Client	Griffith Trust