How physicists track and trap the elusive neutrino

ktallett

There is a good exhibit on this at the Miraikan in Odaiba, Tokyo. Detecting things and proving we detected what we detected we previously couldn't is always a fascinating exercise, especially whilst so much matter is still unrecognised.

SiempreViernes

For anyone wondering about the title, by "trap" they mean "detect destructively": there are no stable neutrinos in a bottle in this article.

semiquaver

HN automangled the title, should have a “how” at the beginning. The change makes the headline sound like this is news, but it’s just a description of neutrino detectors.

mrguyorama

Wonderful pictures! The Super Kamiokande had a terrible engineering event where the delicate sensor bulbs shattered, and the pressure delta from one shattering caused neighbors to shatter, in a chain reaction that destroyed large amounts of sensors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoBFjD5tn_E Unrelated: >Neutrinos come in three different “flavors” (electron, muon, and tau) and can oscillate, or switch, between them. To do so, neutrinos must have mass Why? What actually is "Neutrino oscillation" and why does it require the neutrino have mass? My already feeble understanding of particle and quantum physics always breaks down at these sorts of points. How are we sure that the neutrino is in fact a single particle that should use the same sort of mathematical machinery as all others? Am I even asking a question that means something? I know literally every physicist ever graduated has spent time thinking everything in physics is wrong and tried poking at such ideas, so I guess I'm more interested in what those kids end up finding that brings them back to "No this makes more sense" of neutrinos in the standard model.

gattr

Could a physicist comment on this? I've been reading on the CNO cycle [1], where it says neutrinos produced in the beta-decay steps can have any share of the resulting energy. Does it mean the Sun is shrouded in a rarefied cloud of such low-energy neutrinos which failed to achieve escape velocity? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle

anonymousiam

From the (captions under photographs) in the article: 'Located 2.1 kilometers underground in the Creighton mine in Ontario, Canada, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory’s detector (left) was filled with “heavy” water, which features deuterium in place of hydrogen atoms. Its findings provided evidence that neutrinos can change, or “oscillate,” between different flavors.' "China’s Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), seen here under construction in 2023, is currently the world’s largest neutrino detector. It began collecting data in August 2025; one of its main goals is to determine the outstanding mystery of how heavy each flavor of neutrino is." The second caption implies that some "flavors" of neutrino may be heavier than other flavors. The first caption says that neutrinos oscillate between different flavors. If the first caption is correct, then wouldn't each flavor of neutrino be just as heavy as the others?

IndySun

Related BBC radio 4. Featuring the lovely Frank Close (I added the lovely). https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0106tjc