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Discussion (35 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
original article: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21104 or https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/xwqy-yzrk
Is there any hope to have know more about them? To point at some and say "they are neutrinos" is a big promising step, but what about others? Was it a proton, or neutron, or electron or what? Where did this particle come from, and who was so pissed off to kick it that hard. I mean, I read wikipedia a lot, I have an idea what kind of processes can create these particles, but if we could find an extremely red shifted galaxy on a photo from James Webb and say that THAT proton came from there, it would be very nice.
But yes, one of the main reasons we are looking for ultra-energetic neutrinos is to try to understand the sources of high energy particles in general, as the highest energy charged particles are harder to point due to bending in magnetic fields. Measuring UHE protons from high red shifts is not possible due to the GZK mechanism, but that same mechanism will produce neutrinos that we are hoping to detect!
I love the patience involved in this kind of science.
The 5-station analysis covering a number of years is coming out soon (but searching for neutrinos, not impacting air showers, which is what this PRL is about) .
I just want to come round again to how amazing it is to have a small slice of the internet where “amazeballs scientific discovery happens” and we get, of course, someone on the site who has been part of it.
(Hat goes back in box)
There aren't a lot of places with multiple km of water without things like animal life or other confounders.
Uniformity of the light field is going to be different, but that is not my sub-domain.
Higher energy = "easier" to detect (produce more light or radio emission), but the events are rarer so you want to build a bigger detector.
There are also underwater pools of water being used :) (KM3Net,P-ONE, Baikal-GVD, etc.)
When a high-energy particle (cosmic ray, say) hits ice, it creates an interaction cascade. (Think of what the Fly's Eye experiment sees, but in ice.) That interaction cascade creates (among other things) a radio signal. This detector is a radio detector under Antarctic ice, looking for exactly that.
The point is that, if a high-energy neutrino were to hit the ice, it could create the same kind of cascade, but it would make it much further into the ice. By having multiple detectors, they can pin down the location, and so they can try to tell the difference between "regular" cosmic rays and high-energy neutrinos.
The detector seems to be functioning as designed. They have seven candidate neutrino interactions.
This radio emisison (Askaryan emission) is the mechanism by which we hope to detect neutrinos with detectors like ARA (and also PUEO, RNO-G, etc. which I also work on :) ), but these events are actually candidate impacting cosmic rays. UHE cosmic rays (protons, and heavier nuclei) are charged particles that will start cascading in the atmosphere, but in certain near- vertical geometries, the shower is not "expended" before reaching the ice (which lies at an altitude of ~3km), so the dense shower core enters the ice, producing radio emission from the same mechanism through which we hope to detect neutrinos. While the Askaryan mechanism was detected in ice in beam line experiments and also in the atmosphere (where it is subdominant to radio emission from charged particles bending in the Earth's magnetic field), this is the first detection of the Askaryan effect in natural ice, proving that the emission matches our models. The cosmic rays themselves are not super interesting in the sense that there are other detectors that are much better at detecting cosmic rays (e.g .TA or Pierre Auger).
They have Google ads on their site promoting a paid ad free version of their site? WTF? Why would you pay google to put ads for on your site for your own service?
Note that the author order is alphabetical but one of the primary authors happens to be first alphabetically.
i don't presume to know whether Cthulhu is the hero we need or the hero we deserve.
it was always burning since the world was turning
Not really something I’d want to try out in practice, seems like a fire in a nuclear reactor under the ocean, where the source of the fire explodes on contact with water, is a less-than-ideal situation.
Not a bad metaphor for the times, though.