Nuclear Power Station Glow Detected in Pure Water 150 Miles Away
Back in 2018, a tank of the purest water, buried under kilometers of rock in Ontario, Canada, flashed as barely detectable particle slammed through its molecules
It was the first time that water has been used to detect a particle known as an antineutrino, which originated from a nuclear reactor more than 240 kilometers (150 miles) away.
This incredible breakthrough promises neutrino experiments and monitoring technology that use inexpensive, easily acquirable and safe materials.
As some of the most abundant particles in the Universe, neutrinos are odd little things with a lot of potential for revealing deeper insights into the Universe. Unfortunately they are almost massless, carry no charge, and barely interact with other particles at all.
They mostly stream through space and rock alike, as though all matter was incorporeal. There’s a reason they’re known as ghost particles.
Antineutrinos are the antiparticle counterpart to neutrinos. Usually, an antiparticle has the opposite charge to its particle equivalent; the antiparticle of the negatively charged electron, for example, is the positively charged positron.
Since neutrinos don’t carry a charge, scientists can only tell the two apart based on the fact an electron neutrino will pop into existence alongside a positron (anti-electron), while an electron antineutrino appears with an electron.
Electron antineutrinos are emitted during nuclear beta decay, a type of radioactive decay in which a neutron decays into a proton, an electron, and antineutrino. One of these electron antineutrinos can then interact with a proton to produce a positron and a neutron, a reaction known as inverse beta decay.
Large, liquid filled tanks lined with photomultiplier tubes are used to detect this particular kind of decay. They’re designed to capture the faint glow of Cherenkov radiation created by charged particles moving faster than light can travel through the liquid, similar to the sonic boom generated by breaking the sound barrier.
So they’re very sensitive to very faint light.
Antineutrinos are produced in prodigious quantities by nuclear reactors, but they’re relatively low energy, which makes them difficult to detect.
Enter SNO+. Buried beneath more than 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) of rock, it’s the world’s deepest underground laboratory. This rock shielding provides an effective barrier against interference by cosmic rays, allowing scientists to obtain exceptionally well resolved signals.
Today the lab’s 780-tonne spherical tank is filled with linear alkylbenzene, a liquid scintillator that amplifies light. Back in 2018, while the facility was undergoing calibration, it was filled with ultrapure water.
Combing through the 190 days’ worth of data collected during that calibration phase back in 2018, the SNO+ collaboration found evidence of inverse beta decay. The neutron produced during this process is captured by a hydrogen nucleus in the water, which in turn produces a soft bloom of light at a very specific energy level, 2.2 megaelectronvolts.
Water Cherenkov detectors generally struggle to detect signals below 3 megaelectronvolts; but a water-filled SNO+ was able to detect down to 1.4 megaelectronvolts. This produces an efficiency of around 50 percent for detecting signals at 2.2 megaelectronvolts, so the team thought it was worth their luck looking for signs of inverse beta decay.
An analysis of a candidate signal determined that it was likely produced by an antineutrino, with a confidence level of 3 sigma – a 99.7 percent probability.
The result suggests that water detectors could be used to monitor the power production of nuclear reactors.
Meanwhile, SNO+ is being put to use to help understand neutrinos and antineutrinos better. Because neutrinos are impossible to measure directly, we don’t know much about them. One of the biggest questions is whether neutrinos and antineutrinos are the exact same particle.
A rare, never-before-seen decay would answer this question. SNO+ is currently looking for this decay.
“It intrigues us that pure water can be used to measure antineutrinos from reactors and at such large distances,” said physicist Logan Lebanowski of the SNO+ collaboration and the University of California, Berkeley, back in March 2023.
“We spent significant effort to extract a handful of signals from 190 days of data. The result is gratifying.”
The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.
See more here sciencealert.com
Header image: Snolab
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Herb Rose
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Neutrinos are nonsense, created to make Einstein’s special relativity theory correct even though the evidence showed it to be wrong.
Pure water consists of H2O, OH- and H+.ions. These ions are created when the water absorbs energy and are constantly being created and neutralized. Is it possible that when a negative and positive charge come together it produces flash of light?
Can’t be, there is a need to find any supporting evidence to preserve the make believe fantasy of physics.
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PhD
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Herb is an eternal critic of Relativity….. he has never understood that Special Relativity actually does not exist in nature because it can only be true in a massless universe. And General Relativity as currently promoted only covers Gravity. There is a brilliant expansion of Einstein’s work that uses a paper that Einstein and Mayer wrote but Einstein failed to see its significance…… when the paper is followed and you re-derive the GM equation you find Gravity and EM in one set of coupled equations …… QM is only an approximate calculational technique for low energy solutions to these equations. Basically these equations show that there are only two forces in the universe …… Gravity and EM.
The strong and weak nuclear forces are simply Gravity and EM manifestations at very small dimensions.
Modern Physics is following the wrong idea ….. they hope to find Gravity from QM….. but it’s actually General Relativity that points the way to the GUT. Work worthy of a Nobel Prize has shown the way.
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Herb Rose
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Hi PhD,
Perhaps you can resolve a problem I have with General Relativity. Since the speed of light is constant, any variation in time must cause a proportional variation in distance. An increase in a gravitational field will cause a expansion of time and distance so how can getting closer to a center of gravity causing a expansion in time also cause the distance to the center of gravity to increase?
Herb
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Jerry Krause
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This article and the comments are about physical scientific ideas for which PSI was founded to be freely shared. Herb doesn’t believe Einstren’s ideas are correct, nor should anybody, unless they can point to multiple, common observations, which prove any idea cannot be correct.
Some notable scientists of the past, and present, agree that an idea of science must predict something not yet knowingly observed. The problem with this stipulation is that one can point to evidence that the most obvious is most difficult to see.
For example I have pointed to the common meteor;pgpcal measurements are that the measured air temperature has never been been less than the measured dew point temperature when both are measured, by standard methods, at the same place and time. And a known prediction of the idea generally termed the Greenhouse Effect of the trace atmospheric carbon dioxide gas (GHE) that the measured air temperature would be about 33C (56F) lower if there were no trace atmospheric gas. So the observed relationship between the atmospheric temperature and the atmospheric dew point temperature absolutely proves the GHE to be wrong.
But another observed fact is everyone has the freedom to be wrong. And I have the freedom to write that which I just wrote
Have a good day
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