What does the Super-Kamiokande do?

What does the Super-Kamiokande do?

The Super-Kamiokande (SK) is a Cherenkov detector used to study neutrinos from different sources including the Sun, supernovae, the atmosphere, and accelerators. It is also used to search for proton decay.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is a Kamiokande neutrino detector?

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.

When was Super-Kamiokande built?

The Super-Kamiokande was built so deep into the ground in order to shield the device from cosmic rays and other particles which can adversely affect observation. Construction started in 1991 and the observation facility went into operation in April 1996.

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.

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.

How does the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory work?

It used 1000 tonnes of heavy water loaned from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), and contained by a 12 meter diameter acrylic vessel. Neutrinos reacted with the heavy water (D2O) to produce flashes of light called Cherenkov radiation.

Can Jupiter destroy the Solar System?

In the sky, Jupiter doesn’t look too different than other bright planets like Mars or Venus or Saturn. But Jupiter has the power to destroy the Solar System. And many of its cousins (around other stars) are planetary murderers (eek!). Jupiter is the Solar System’s most massive planet.

Can neutrinos harm humans?

There is no risk associated with neutrinos—either from naturally produced neutrinos or from factory produced neutrinos. Trillions of neutrinos, in fact, pass through our body every second without doing any harm to us.

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.