China’s TRIDENT: World’s Largest Ghost Particle Telescope to Trace Origins of Elusive Neutrinos

KOMPAS.com – Scientists in China are building a detector in the form of the world’s largest “ghost particle” telescope, which is at a depth of 3,500 meters below sea level.

The Tropical Deep-sea Neutrino Telescope (TRIDENT), also called Hai ling or “Sea Bell” in Chinese, will be on the seabed of the Western Pacific Ocean.

Once completed in 2030, this tool will be used to scan rare flashes of light produced by elusive particles in the depths of the ocean.

Every second, about 100 billion “ghost” particles, called neutrinos, pass through every square centimeter of our body. However, the absence of electric charge and the nearly zero mass of neutrinos means these particles barely interact with other types of matter.

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By slowing neutrinos and using TRIDENT, physicists can trace the origins of some particles billions of light years away from violent star explosions and ancient galaxy collisions.

Xu Donglian, the project’s chief scientist, said that TRIDENT’s caffene is near the equator, TRIDENT can detect neutrinos coming from all directions along with the Earth’s rotation, allowing observations without blind spots.

In addition, to increase the probability of neutrino particle interactions, the detector should be placed under a lot of water or ice.

China’s new giant detector will consist of more than 24,000 optical sensors mounted on 1,211 strings, each 700 m long, that will float upwards from their anchor points on the seabed.

The detector will stretch 4 km in diameter. When operating, it will scan for neutrinos in an area of ​​7.5 cubic km.

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The world’s largest neutrino detector currently, IceCube, located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, only has a monitoring area of ​​1 cubic km, meaning TRIDENT would be much more sensitive and more likely to find neutrinos.

As researchers say in the journal Nature Astronomy, TRIDENT was created with the aim of pushing the limits of neutrino telescope performance, reaching new limits of sensitivity in the search for astrophysical neutrino sources throughout space.

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2023-10-18 07:00:00
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