Neutrinos are exceedingly common in the Universe, with billions of them zipping around us throughout the day from a variety of sources. Due to their extremely low mass and no electric charge they barely ever interact with other particles, making these so-called ‘ghost particles’ very hard to detect. That said, when they do interact the result is rather spectacular as they impart significant kinetic energy. The resulting flash of energy is used by neutrino detectors, with most neutrinos generally pegging out at around 10 petaelectronvolt (PeV), except for a 2023 event.
This neutrino event which occurred on February 13th back in 2023 was detected by the KM3NeT/ARCA detector and has now been classified as an ultra-high energy neutrino event at 220 PeV, suggesting that it was likely a cosmogenic neutrinos. When we originally reported on this KM3-230213A event, the data was still being analyzed based on a detected muon from the neutrino interaction even, with the researchers also having to exclude the possibility of it being a sensor glitch.
By comparing the KM3-230213A event data with data from other events at other detectors, it was possible to deduce that the most likely explanation was one of these ultra-high energy neutrinos. Since these are relatively rare compared to neutrinos that originate within or near Earth’s solar system, it’ll likely take a while for more of these detection events. As the KM3NeT/ARCA detector grid is still being expanded, we may see many more of them in Earth’s oceans. After all, if a neutrino hits a particle but there’s no sensor around to detect it, we’d never know it happened.
Top image: One of the photo-detector spheres of ARCA (Credit: KM3NeT)
I don’t have anything useful to add whatsoever, but there can’t be too many songs written about subatomic particles. However Klaatu’s ‘Little Neutrino’ is one, almost 50 years old now:
“And now I’m passing through
The one who’s known as you
And yet you’ll never know I do”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dkKcf40YfE&list=RD3dkKcf40YfE
Les Horribles Cernettes: “Collider” “Every Proton of You” , “Strong Interaction”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Horribles_Cernettes
I’m partial to Hank Green’s “Strange Charm”
https://youtu.be/U0kXkWXSXRA?si=3M_fSMciTxTgA9No
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_Dance
Re: Particle Man – is there anyone out there who would get a “Waiter!” reference?
“Due to their extremely low mass and no electric charge they barely ever interact with other particles, making these so-called ‘ghost particles’ very hard to detect. That said, when they do interact the result is rather spectacular as they impart significant kinetic energy.”
Actually, at these energies, they don’t “barely interact” – there’s no way that neutrino was going to make it through the Earth. Once you get into the EeV range, the neutrino’s interaction length drops to maybe a thousand kilometers of water equivalent (as in 1000 km in 1 g/cm^3 material, 200 km in 5 g/cm^3 material, etc.).
The difficulty detecting them is just that there aren’t many at these energies, because there’s not much of anything at these energies. 220 PeV is a good fraction of a joule (*)! You try shoving that much energy into a single particle.
(*: regardless of what Google’s crappy AI thinks, 220 PeV is 2.2E17 J = 0.0352 J)
Here’s one, three orders of magnitude larger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle
The whole phenomenon of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is fascinating. Mechanisms for acceleration are not yet settled.
Yup, although the reason we’ve seen more UHECRs rather than UHE neutrinos is because you just need atmosphere to detect cosmic rays, whereas you need dense matter to detect neutrinos. Easier to stare at many many cubic kilometers of air than cubic kilometers of “stuff.”
The highest energy cosmic rays are why we’re certain that UHE neutrinos exist – we call those “cosmogenic” – they’re produced by UHECRS losing energy against the microwave background. And while the original CR can’t travel that far cosmologically, the neutrino can.
There might even be more neutrinos than that, though, since those are the ones produced in transit: they can be produced by the source directly.
But that’s why the rates of all these high energy things are all roughly similar. Basically all the same sources.
This is a realy nice project. alot of info can be found on this on the net
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/13/11/2044
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Photo-of-a-selection-of-components-of-an-optical-module_fig2_359368834
If You have a phone (meybe old phone ) instal please https://credo.science/
simple program for detect very energetic neutrino or mions.
Since you gave off many red flags for scam I decided to look into, and surprisingly it is a legitimate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic-Ray_Extremely_Distributed_Observatory
Your red flags 1: random number and letter username 2: Misspelling and grammar errors as some bots use that to avoid comments from being automatically deleted 3: Very little context, knowing who runs the project and how it works is only a few sentences more, but makes it take less effort to verify it’s integrity.