And it’s really difficult to detect these gentle interactions. Collar’s group bombarded their detector with trillions of neutrinos per second, but over 15 months, they only caught a neutrino bumping against an atomic nucleus 134 times. To block stray particles, they put 20 feet of steel and a hundred feet of concrete and gravel between the detector and the neutrino source. The odds that the signal was random noise is less than 1 in 3.5 million—surpassing particle physicists’ usual gold standard for announcing a discovery. For the first time, they saw a neutrino nudge an entire atomic nucleus.
Currently, the entire paper is available from the Science website.
Zz.
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