Tabletop Particle Detector May Measure the Energy of an Electron

[Guest_Jim_*]

Right now billions of neutrinos are streaming through your body, without interacting with any of your cells. Neutrinos are weird particles like that, as they do not interact with much of anything, so we have little knowledge of them. Researchers at MIT, however, may be bringing us closer to determining their mass with a new particle detector.

Many processes emit neutrinos, including the decay of tritium into an isotope of helium. When this happens, a neutrons turns into a proton and emits an electron and a neutron. As the sum of the output must add up to the input, researchers want to narrow down the energy of a single electron to determine the mass of a single neutrino. To that end the MIT researchers have built a particle detector that can pick up the emissions of a single electron. It works by trapping the electron in a magnetic bottle, and then, when the electron moves through a magnetic field, it emits radio waves, which can be used to analyze the electron.

This new detector is small enough to fit on a table top and the area the electrons are tracked in is smaller than a stamp. This in comparison to an advanced spectrometer being used elsewhere that barely fit in city streets. Currently the detector has only worked with krypton, but in a couple years it should be able to move up to tritium.

Source: MIT