MINOS
Monday, April 17. 2006
Soudan, MN (Jun 7, 2004)
The big black octagon is a particle detector. Its lair is 2341 ft below the surface, in a deep cavern at the bottom of the Soudan iron mine in Minnesota. It catches neutrinos, little tiny particles that shy their way through matter like shadows in the night. Some neutrinos are born in the nuclear furnaces of stars. Like Prometeus, they bring us the secret of the perennial fire that blaze into the Sun. Others are the offspring of a celestial marriage between the cosmic rays raining from the sky, and the Earth atmosphere shielding us from them. Every time an atom breaks some neutrinos are produced, stealing away part of the energy, to confuse physicists as they run away before they can be caught. They are so shy that we almost never see them, despite the fact that a hundred trillion of them is passing through our body every second. They can pass through the whole Earth without even budging...
But the beast has been patient. For one year its 5,400 tons of iron have waited for a few casual encounters, a handful of distracted neutrinos seduced by its whispering voice. Conjured by the power of the ring at Fermilab, these neutrinos have traveled unperturbed for 735 km from Illinois to Minnesota, through hard rocks and below Lake Superior, until they met their fate in the iron lair. Captured, measured. Counted. Until their weight is revealed.
...
The lab is actually open to the public (you can do a public tour). The old mine was very central to the economy of the village around it, so when it was closed and converted into a scientific laboratory a lot of efforts were made to involve the local population in the project. Not just in terms of workforce, but also to show the people living in the area what was kind of activities were actually done in their old mine. I visited the place during the summer of 2004. My wife works in the experiment and was there for a meeting, and I tagged along taking the opportunity to visit the lab, and see the beautiful nature of northern Minnesota (the Boundary Waters region).
The experiment is very cool, and the first results were published a couple of weeks ago. The goal of the experiment is to determine if Neutrinos have mass. The “Standard Model” currently adopted to describe subatomic particles assumes that Neutrinos do not have mass. This experiment (and others that made similar measurements, among which one in Kamioka, Japan and the one in Sudbury) however showed that neutrinos do have mass, and thus that the Standard Model is ultimately not complete (which means that physicists don’t really know everything about how nature behaves).
A really cool thing: if you go at the web page of the experiment you can see the the particles registered by the detector in real time here.
The mural on the wall cave was made by Joseph Giannetti and symbolizes the ongoing experiments in the lab (and you can recognize the portrait of Enrico Fermi on the top left). There is a web page dedicated to the mural here.
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What a story! 735 km is quite a distance. Could you simply enter this place as a visitor or do you know someone who works there?
I’m always amazed at the lengths we must go to in order to conduct certain research - that’s one deep chamber. And what a colorful view into this facility! I’d be curious to learn a bit more about that huge artwork on the right...
I wonder if you have ever visited a similar site in Sudbury, ON Canada?
Fascinating. And what a great opportunity to see something like this in person -- a chance not many of us have.
I swear, Massimo, you get to do the coolest things. I love this kind of stuff. Thank you for sharing it with us!
That is amazing. What a wild photograph and inside glimpse at this. It reminds me of some horror movie, not it reminds me more of the Star Wars movies.
Great photo and great post. It’s cool to have all the background information and links. I’ve tried to do that to a small extent with a few of my posts so I know how much extra work it takes. Thanks for taking the time.
Wow! cuantas cosas interesantisimas existen y uno no tiene ni idea!
Thanks for letting us know. I always feel a little smarter, a little more informed, after visiting your site.
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