Elusive ‘Geoneutrinos’ Are Building a New Map of Earth’s Volatile Interior
The original version ofthis storyappeared inQuanta Magazine.
In a laboratory 2 kilometers underground, a crane lowers Matt Depatie, a detector technologist, through a hatch into a white-walled cavern filled with about 7,000 tons of ultrapure water that glows as blue as wiper fluid in the light. “Splashdown,” Depatie says over a radio as he steps into an inflatable raft waiting below.
Normally, the cavern is one of the darkest places on Earth, but today it is lit up for maintenance, offering us a rare chance to see inside. I peer through the hatch at Depatie as he paddles over to examine the submerged experiment. He’s inspecting a house-sized detector built to catch some of the most elusive particles known to physics: neutrinos.
This is the SNO+ neutrino experiment, buried deep within the Creighton mine at Snolab, an underground physics laboratory in Sudbury, Canada. SNO+ consists of...
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