Saturday, December 23, 2023

DUNE INFRASTRUCTURE NEARING COMPLETION.

DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment) in Illinois (the particle accelerator) and South Dakota (the detector) is one of the two current massive undertakings with the aim of detecting and studying neutrinos, the other one being Japan's Hyper Kamiokande.





At the Big Bang an unfathomable amount of energy came free. Per Einsteins equation, energy can be transformed in mass and vice versa. The laws of physics dictate that every matter particle should have its own antimatter particle, and it is thought that in the very beginning this was indeed the case. Yet what we see around is only matter - composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. Which is logical, because each matter particle that would meet an antimatter particle would lead to instant annihilation whereby energy would be generated. But we are here, in the present, and can see and touch things, which means there is (almost) no antimatter, or anyway, that we can easily detect in a natural way. Mankind can in the meantime 'make' antimatter, as CERN's AlphaG experiment has demonstrated. But for the present only in very tiny amounts - we are talking about little 'clouds' of antimatter consisting of a couple of hundred anti-hydrogen atoms (an antiproton and a positron), kept in place by a magnetic field lest they touch the vessel in which they are kept and annihilate.


The study of neutrinos may offer crucial insight into the how and why of there being so much more matter than antimatter. Exciting times ahead!






MFBB.

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