The World’s Largest Undersea Ghost Particle Detector Could Be Installed by China

Jakarta –

The Chinese Academy of Sciences announced plans to build a neutrino-capturing detector, the world’s most elusive particle. This detector will be built deep under the sea.

This detector is not the only one in the world. Similar work is underway to build a neutrino detector in the Mediterranean Sea. One detector was proposed off the coast of British Columbia, and Russia is currently adding one to Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world.

There are currently trillions of neutrinos passing through every inch of the human body. However, humans will not feel anything. Neutrinos, better known as ghost particles, are the most elusive particles in the universe. Despite all the known data, the main unsolved problem is the source of the high-energy neutrinos.

These particles have very little mass and no electrical charge, so they hardly interact with other matter, but that doesn’t mean they never do. When it does, the event emits a light that can be observed by special cameras.

To ensure we get detection, it’s best to have a lot of transparent material, and water (or ice) works very well for that. China’s plan to build the detector covers a volume of 30 cubic kilometers, located 1 kilometer below sea level, with the detector strand extending for about 3.1 kilometers. If successful, this facility will be the largest neutrino detector in the world.

The purpose of this facility is to study cosmic neutrinos that come from the most energetic sources, such as supernovae or highly active supermassive black holes. It’s difficult to trace these elusive particles to their source.

In 2018, scientists conducted the IceCube experiment for the first time using Antarctic ice instead of liquid water to study the event. This neutrino detector can work with gamma-ray observatories such as NASA’s Fermi or the China High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO).

“If we can detect two particles simultaneously, we can determine the origin of cosmic rays,” said Chen Mingjun, principal investigator of the project at the Institute of High Energy Physics.

Europe’s own ghost particle detector, known as the Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope, is being built off the coasts of France, Italy and Greece. The first two sites have built subdetectors, one of which looks specifically at cosmic neutrinos while the other examines the properties of the neutrino itself.

While the Russian detector was a major upgrade from their much smaller first detector and was built between 1990 and 1998, the detector’s capacity was increased in 2005.

In its current state, it has a volume of about half a cubic kilometer. If all of these detectors (and some others) are operational, our ability to track cosmic neutrinos will be massively improved.

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(rns/rns)