The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Plus ( SNO+ ) is a neutrino demodulator located late within Creighton Mine in Sudbury , Ontario . At 2,100 meters ( 6,890 feet ) below dry land , it is shielded from most cosmic atom coming from above . But not all . And those that can get there are its target : neutrinos .
Neutrinos are elementary speck with very little mass and no electric charge , which allows them to pass along through solid matter with no bother at all . Every 2nd , trillions of neutrino are going through each square centimeter of your body and you ’re none the wiser . But with some substances , you may get some rarefied fundamental interaction between neutrino and matter that releases light . And that luminousness can be observed and the neutrino that cause it study .
This is the end of SNO+ : learn neutrinos amount from the Sun , the Earth , and , for example , if a supernova were to go off in our extragalactic nebula , also from those events . But the ones record in the first 190 years of testing do n’t come from any of these sources . They come from nuclear reactor . Specifically , the Bruce , Darlington , and Pickering nuclear reactors . Those are locate 240 kilometers ( 150 miles ) from the demodulator .
“ It intrigues us that pure water can be used to value antineutrino from reactor and at such large distances , ” SNO+ collaboration appendage Logan Lebanowski say in astatement . “ We spent significant effort to extract a handful of signal from 190 days of data . The result is pander . ”
Neutrinos and antineutrinos are both produced in atomic reactions . Antineutrinos in especial are release when a neutron in some radioactive element turns into a proton and an electron . Water was not await to be such a good detector of these neutrinos in such a comparatively small detector ( only five - history tall ) .
Experiments in ocean , lake , and ice-skating rink tend to make up for the limitations of water byhaving a huge volume . But SNO+ shows that you could monitor atomic reactors using neutrino detectors that do n’t call for toxic or dangerous liquidness as scintillators , just extremist - gross water .
The liquid state inside SNO+ is now been change to a scintillator which is no farsighted weewee but a liquidness exchangeable to a mineral oil . This liquid is more probable to interact with neutrinos than water system , so require more results from this detector .
“ This finding is a great indicator that we can expect very exciting cathartic from the scintillator phase , go now for nearly 10 months , well into the time to come , ” said SNOLAB inquiry scientist Christine Kraus .
The study is published inPhysical Review Letters .
