Highest-energy neutrino ever detected
27 Aug 2015 by Evoluted New Media
Physicists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located at the South Pole, have measured the highest energy neutrinos ever recorded.
An international research team led by the University Wisconsin-Madison used data from the detector at the IceCube Observatory and recorded the energy of muon neutrinos – one of the three types of neutrinos – to be more than 2,600 trillion electronvolts.
In the study, the IceCube collaboration team conducted blind analysis by investigating the data in large batches collected over a couple of years. The researchers observed how muon neutrinos – produced in neutrino interactions with the ice of the IceCube detector – interacted, and how they released a heavy electron, known as muon, that can travel straight through matter for several kilometres.
“We have been adding to our previous analysis more years of data, and in an extra year we found this spectacular event,” said research leader Professor Francis Halzen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The scientists believe the neutrino that produced this high energy event – originally recorded on 11 June 2014 – had energy about three times the detected energy.
Next, the team is planning to send real time alerts of ultra-high-energy neutrino events to experiments that study gamma rays. They hope this will help telescopes such as the VERITAS telescope or the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope point in the right direction to try to find a signal.
Professor Halzen said: “We are now going to announce events in real time. We’re going to bring out events like this hopefully in minutes.”
By studying these high energy events the physicists hope find the source of these ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
Paper: https://indico.cern.ch/event/344485/session/106/contribution/642
