Forty different universities and institutions from across Europe are partnering on a project to build a neutrino observatory under the Mediterranean sea that will be the second-largest structure ever built by humans, after the Great Wall of China.
The KM3NeT telescope will have a volume of "several" cubic kilometres -- hence the odd name, which purportedly stands for "kilometre-cubed neutrino telescope". It will comprise of a number of towers -- each taller than the 830-metre Burj Khalifa in Dubai -- which will be filled with spheres containing photomultiplier tubes, which will record neutrinos passing through.
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Neutrinos are notoriously tricksy little particles, formed in certain types of radioactive decay. They get their name because they carry no electrical charge, but that property also means that they can pass through matter virtually unimpeded, making them difficult to spot. Whereas an electron passing through a 3-centimetre thick sheet of metal will lose significant amounts of energy, a neutrino of the same energy would need something like a light-year's worth of heavy metal to lose the same amount.
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Peter Fisher, a particle physicist at MIT, explained to Popsci: "Anytime you detect a particle, what you're always doing is having the particle interact with some kind of matter, whether it's water, steel, air or ice. The less the particle interacts, the more material you need for it to interact in."
| KM3NeT uses the ocean instead. Hundreds of metres of seawater act as a shield, blocking interference from particles generated in our atmosphere, and allow the photomultipliers to capture the bright blue flash caused when a neutrino hits the nucleus of an atom and produces a charged particle known as a muon. Giorgio Riccobene, a staff researcher at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, said: "This is the light we look for to reconstruct the trajectory of the muon," Riccobene said. "So, in this sense, it is an underwater telescope. The water allows us to see the reaction more clearly." |
The structure is still in the planning phases, and funding is proving problematic given the current state of European finances and politics, but if all goes well then construction could begin as early as 2012.
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