Latest news with #particlephysics
New York Times
31-07-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Mary K. Gaillard, Physicist Who Probed the Subatomic Universe, Dies at 86
Mary K. Gaillard was 16 and still known as Mary Ralph when a boy in her neighborhood asked her what she wanted to do with her life. She told him that she wanted to be a physicist. 'A singularly unfeminine profession,' he replied. Decades later, that remark would inspire the title of Dr. Gaillard's memoir, 'A Singularly Unfeminine Profession: One Woman's Journey in Physics' (2015), in which she recounted a career spanning a golden age of particle physics, when the outlines of how nature behaves at subatomic scales were just beginning to emerge. Dr. Gaillard contributed key insights to what is now known as the Standard Model — scientists' best theory about the properties and interactions of elementary particles — while overcoming discrimination as one of the few women in her field and inspiring other female physicists to do the same. Physics was 'her life,' her son Bruno said. 'She was consumed by it.' Known to many as Mary K, sans period, Dr. Gaillard, who died on May 23 at 86, was the first woman hired by the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley, and later became a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. But much of her groundbreaking work occurred earlier, during a long stint as an unpaid visiting scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, a laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border. She was 'brilliant at doing calculations,' said John Ellis, a physicist at King's College London, who collaborated with Dr. Gaillard at CERN. 'If she calculated something, you could be sure that it was correct.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
NHK
29-06-2025
- Science
- NHK
Site of massive neutrino detector in Japan shown to media
Reporters have been invited to take their first look at the cavern being built to house the Hyper-Kamiokande detector for observing elementary particles, which are called neutrinos. A large cavern for the detector at a depth of 600 meters underground in the city of Hida, Gifu Prefecture, was shown to the media on Saturday. The cavern, with a diameter of 69 meters and height of 94 meters, is scheduled to be completed next month. A giant water tank will then be installed. The tank's inner walls will be lined with about 20-thousand ultra-high sensitivity photosensors for observing neutrinos. The construction of the Hyper-Kamiokande detector began in 2020, with the aim of helping to unravel the mysteries of the birth of the universe. Observations are expected to begin in three years' time. The new detector is capable of observing about eight times more neutrinos than one of its two predecessors. The Super-Kamiokande, along with the Kamiokande detectors, have helped Japanese researchers twice win the Nobel Prize in Physics for successful observations of neutrinos. Kamioka Observatory at the University of Tokyo's Institute for Cosmic Ray Research has been leading the international project. Director Shiozawa Masato said he is relieved to see the cavern will be completed soon. He said he hopes to see research outcomes that would surprise everyone, so he urges people to keep up to date on the project.
Yahoo
21-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Strange signals detected from Antarctic ice seem to defy laws of physics. Scientists are searching for an answer
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Scientists are trying to solve a decade-long mystery by determining the identity of anomalous signals detected from below ice in Antarctica. The strange radio waves emerged during a search for another unusual phenomenon: high-energy cosmic particles known as neutrinos. Arriving at Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos, neutrinos are often called 'ghostly' because they are extremely volatile, or vaporous, and can go through any kind of matter without changing. Over the past decade, researchers have conducted multiple experiments using vast expanses of water and ice that are designed to search for neutrinos, which could shed light on mysterious cosmic rays, the most highly energetic particles in the universe. One of these projects was NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA, experiment, which flew balloons carrying instruments above Antarctica between 2006 and 2016. It was during this hunt that ANITA picked up anomalous radio waves that didn't seem to be neutrinos. The signals came from below the horizon, suggesting they had passed through thousands of miles of rock before reaching the detector. But the radio waves should have been absorbed by the rock. The ANITA team believed these anomalous signals could not be explained by the current understanding of particle physics. Follow-up observations and analyses with other instruments, including one recently conducted by the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, have not been able to find the same signals. The results of the Pierre Auger Collaboration were published in the journal Physical Review Letters in March. The origin of the anomalous signals remains unclear, said study coauthor Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics at the Pennsylvania State University. 'Our new study indicates that such (signals) have not been seen by an experiment … like the Pierre Auger Observatory,' Wissel said. 'So, it does not indicate that there is new physics, but rather more information to add to the story.' Larger, more sensitive detectors may be able to solve the mystery, or ultimately prove whether the anomalous signals were a fluke, while continuing the search for enigmatic neutrinos and their sources, scientists say. Detecting neutrinos on Earth allows researchers to trace them back to their sources, which scientists believe are primarily cosmic rays that strike our planet's atmosphere. The most highly energetic particles in the universe, cosmic rays are made up mostly of protons or atomic nuclei, and they are unleashed across the universe because whatever produces them is such a powerful particle accelerator that it dwarfs the capabilities of the Large Hadron Collider. Neutrinos could help astronomers better understand cosmic rays and what launches them across the cosmos. But neutrinos are difficult to find because they have almost no mass and can pass through the most extreme environments, like stars and entire galaxies, unchanged. They do, however, interact with water and ice. ANITA was designed to search for the highest energy neutrinos in the universe, at higher energies than have yet been detected, said Justin Vandenbroucke, an associate professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The experiment's radio antennae search for a short pulse of radio waves produced when a neutrino collides with an atom in the Antarctic ice, leading to a shower of lower-energy particles, he said. During its flights, ANITA found high-energy fountains of particles coming from the ice, a kind of upside-down shower of cosmic rays. The detector is also sensitive to ultrahigh energy cosmic rays that rain down on Earth and create a radio burst that acts like a flashlight beam of radio waves. When ANITA watches a cosmic ray, the flashlight beam is really a burst of radio waves one-billionth of a second long that can be mapped like a wave to show how it reflects off the ice. Twice in their data from ANITA flights, the experiment's original team spotted signals coming up through the ice at a much sharper angle than ever predicted by any models, making it impossible to trace the signals to their original sources. 'The radio waves that we detected nearly a decade ago were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,' Wissel said. Neutrinos can travel through a lot of matter, but not all the way through the Earth, Vandenbroucke said. 'They are expected to arrive from slightly below the horizon, where there is not much Earth for them to be absorbed,' he wrote in an email. 'The ANITA anomalous events are intriguing because they appear to come from well below the horizon, so the neutrinos would have to travel through much of the Earth. This is not possible according to the Standard Model of particle physics.' The Pierre Auger Collaboration, which includes hundreds of scientists around the world, analyzed more than a decade's worth of data to try to understand the anomalous signals detected by ANITA. The team also used their observatory to try to find the same signals. The Auger Observatory is a hybrid detector that uses two methods to find and study cosmic rays. One method relies on finding high-energy particles as they interact with water in tanks on Earth's surface, and the other tracks potential interactions with ultraviolet light high in our planet's atmosphere. 'The Auger Observatory uses a very different technique to observe ultrahigh energy cosmic ray air showers, using the secondary glow of charged particles as they traverse the atmosphere to determine the direction of the cosmic ray that initiated it,' said Peter Gorham, a professor of physics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. 'By using computer simulations of what such a shower of particles would look like if it had behaved like the ANITA anomalous events, they are able to generate a kind of template for similar events and then search their data to see if anything like that appears.' Gorham, who was not involved with the new research, designed the ANITA experiment and has conducted other research to understand more about the anomalous signals. While the Auger Observatory was designed to measure downward-going particle showers produced in the atmosphere by ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, the team redesigned their data analysis to search for upward-going air showers, Vandenbroucke said. Vandenbroucke did not work on the new study, but he peer-reviewed it prior to publication. 'Auger has an enormous collecting area for such events, larger than ANITA,' he said. 'If the ANITA anomalous events are produced by any particle traveling through the Earth and then producing upward-going showers, then Auger should have detected many of them, and it did not.' A separate follow-up study using the IceCube Experiment, which has sensors embedded deep in the Antarctic ice, also searched for the anomalous signals. 'Because IceCube is very sensitive, if the ANITA anomalous events were neutrinos then we would have detected them,' wrote Vandenbroucke, who served as colead of the IceCube Neutrino Sources working group between 2019 and 2022. 'It's an interesting problem because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos,' Wissel said. Oddly enough, a different kind of neutrino, called a tau neutrino, is one hypothesis that some scientists have put forth as the cause of the anomalous signals. Tau neutrinos can regenerate. When they decay at high energies, they produce another tau neutrino, as well as a particle called a tau lepton — similar to an electron, but much heavier. But what makes the tau neutrino scenario very unlikely is the steepness of the angle connected to the signal, Wissel said. 'You expect all these tau neutrinos to be very, very close to the horizon, like maybe one to five degrees below the horizon,' Wissel said. 'These are 30 degrees below the horizon. There's just too much material. They really would actually lose quite a bit of energy and not be detectable.' At the end of the day, Gorham and the other scientists have no idea what the origin of the anomalous ANITA events are. So far, no interpretations match up with the signals, which is what keeps drawing scientists back to try to solve the mystery. The answer may be in sight, however. Wissel is also working on a new detector, the Payload for Ultra-High Energy Observations or PUEO, that will fly over Antarctica for a month beginning in December. Larger and 10 times more sensitive than ANITA, PUEO could reveal more information on what is causing the anomalous signals detected by ANITA, Wissel said. 'Right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries,' Wissel said. 'I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity. In principle, we should be able to better understand these anomalies which will go a long way to understanding our backgrounds and ultimately detecting neutrinos in the future.' Gorham said that PUEO, an acronym that references the Hawaiian owl, should have the sensitivity to capture many anomalous signals and help scientists find an answer. 'Sometimes you just have to go back to the drawing board and really figure out what these things are,' Wissel said. 'The most likely scenario is that it's some mundane physics that can be explained, but we're sort of knocking on all the doors to try to figure out what those are.'
Yahoo
21-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
A hunt for ghostly particles found strange signals coming from Antarctic ice. Scientists are still trying to explain them
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Scientists are trying to solve a decade-long mystery by determining the identity of anomalous signals detected from below ice in Antarctica. The strange radio waves emerged during a search for another unusual phenomenon: high-energy cosmic particles known as neutrinos. Arriving at Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos, neutrinos are often called 'ghostly' because they are extremely volatile, or vaporous, and can go through any kind of matter without changing. Over the past decade, researchers have conducted multiple experiments using vast expanses of water and ice that are designed to search for neutrinos, which could shed light on mysterious cosmic rays, the most highly energetic particles in the universe. One of these projects was NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA, experiment, which flew balloons carrying instruments above Antarctica between 2006 and 2016. It was during this hunt that ANITA picked up anomalous radio waves that didn't seem to be neutrinos. The signals came from below the horizon, suggesting they had passed through thousands of miles of rock before reaching the detector. But the radio waves should have been absorbed by the rock. The ANITA team believed these anomalous signals could not be explained by the current understanding of particle physics. Follow-up observations and analyses with other instruments, including one recently conducted by the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, have not been able to find the same signals. The results of the Pierre Auger Collaboration were published in the journal Physical Review Letters in March. The origin of the anomalous signals remains unclear, said study coauthor Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics at the Pennsylvania State University. 'Our new study indicates that such (signals) have not been seen by an experiment … like the Pierre Auger Observatory,' Wissel said. 'So, it does not indicate that there is new physics, but rather more information to add to the story.' Larger, more sensitive detectors may be able to solve the mystery, or ultimately prove whether the anomalous signals were a fluke, while continuing the search for enigmatic neutrinos and their sources, scientists say. Detecting neutrinos on Earth allows researchers to trace them back to their sources, which scientists believe are primarily cosmic rays that strike our planet's atmosphere. The most highly energetic particles in the universe, cosmic rays are made up mostly of protons or atomic nuclei, and they are unleashed across the universe because whatever produces them is such a powerful particle accelerator that it dwarfs the capabilities of the Large Hadron Collider. Neutrinos could help astronomers better understand cosmic rays and what launches them across the cosmos. But neutrinos are difficult to find because they have almost no mass and can pass through the most extreme environments, like stars and entire galaxies, unchanged. They do, however, interact with water and ice. ANITA was designed to search for the highest energy neutrinos in the universe, at higher energies than have yet been detected, said Justin Vandenbroucke, an associate professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The experiment's radio antennae search for a short pulse of radio waves produced when a neutrino collides with an atom in the Antarctic ice, leading to a shower of lower-energy particles, he said. During its flights, ANITA found high-energy fountains of particles coming from the ice, a kind of upside-down shower of cosmic rays. The detector is also sensitive to ultrahigh energy cosmic rays that rain down on Earth and create a radio burst that acts like a flashlight beam of radio waves. When ANITA watches a cosmic ray, the flashlight beam is really a burst of radio waves one-billionth of a second long that can be mapped like a wave to show how it reflects off the ice. Twice in their data from ANITA flights, the experiment's original team spotted signals coming up through the ice at a much sharper angle than ever predicted by any models, making it impossible to trace the signals to their original sources. 'The radio waves that we detected nearly a decade ago were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,' Wissel said. Neutrinos can travel through a lot of matter, but not all the way through the Earth, Vandenbroucke said. 'They are expected to arrive from slightly below the horizon, where there is not much Earth for them to be absorbed,' he wrote in an email. 'The ANITA anomalous events are intriguing because they appear to come from well below the horizon, so the neutrinos would have to travel through much of the Earth. This is not possible according to the Standard Model of particle physics.' The Pierre Auger Collaboration, which includes hundreds of scientists around the world, analyzed more than a decade's worth of data to try to understand the anomalous signals detected by ANITA. The team also used their observatory to try to find the same signals. The Auger Observatory is a hybrid detector that uses two methods to find and study cosmic rays. One method relies on finding high-energy particles as they interact with water in tanks on Earth's surface, and the other tracks potential interactions with ultraviolet light high in our planet's atmosphere. 'The Auger Observatory uses a very different technique to observe ultrahigh energy cosmic ray air showers, using the secondary glow of charged particles as they traverse the atmosphere to determine the direction of the cosmic ray that initiated it,' said Peter Gorham, a professor of physics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. 'By using computer simulations of what such a shower of particles would look like if it had behaved like the ANITA anomalous events, they are able to generate a kind of template for similar events and then search their data to see if anything like that appears.' Gorham, who was not involved with the new research, designed the ANITA experiment and has conducted other research to understand more about the anomalous signals. While the Auger Observatory was designed to measure downward-going particle showers produced in the atmosphere by ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, the team redesigned their data analysis to search for upward-going air showers, Vandenbroucke said. Vandenbroucke did not work on the new study, but he peer-reviewed it prior to publication. 'Auger has an enormous collecting area for such events, larger than ANITA,' he said. 'If the ANITA anomalous events are produced by any particle traveling through the Earth and then producing upward-going showers, then Auger should have detected many of them, and it did not.' A separate follow-up study using the IceCube Experiment, which has sensors embedded deep in the Antarctic ice, also searched for the anomalous signals. 'Because IceCube is very sensitive, if the ANITA anomalous events were neutrinos then we would have detected them,' wrote Vandenbroucke, who served as colead of the IceCube Neutrino Sources working group between 2019 and 2022. 'It's an interesting problem because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos,' Wissel said. Oddly enough, a different kind of neutrino, called a tau neutrino, is one hypothesis that some scientists have put forth as the cause of the anomalous signals. Tau neutrinos can regenerate. When they decay at high energies, they produce another tau neutrino, as well as a particle called a tau lepton — similar to an electron, but much heavier. But what makes the tau neutrino scenario very unlikely is the steepness of the angle connected to the signal, Wissel said. 'You expect all these tau neutrinos to be very, very close to the horizon, like maybe one to five degrees below the horizon,' Wissel said. 'These are 30 degrees below the horizon. There's just too much material. They really would actually lose quite a bit of energy and not be detectable.' At the end of the day, Gorham and the other scientists have no idea what the origin of the anomalous ANITA events are. So far, no interpretations match up with the signals, which is what keeps drawing scientists back to try to solve the mystery. The answer may be in sight, however. Wissel is also working on a new detector, the Payload for Ultra-High Energy Observations or PUEO, that will fly over Antarctica for a month beginning in December. Larger and 10 times more sensitive than ANITA, PUEO could reveal more information on what is causing the anomalous signals detected by ANITA, Wissel said. 'Right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries,' Wissel said. 'I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity. In principle, we should be able to better understand these anomalies which will go a long way to understanding our backgrounds and ultimately detecting neutrinos in the future.' Gorham said that PUEO, an acronym that references the Hawaiian owl, should have the sensitivity to capture many anomalous signals and help scientists find an answer. 'Sometimes you just have to go back to the drawing board and really figure out what these things are,' Wissel said. 'The most likely scenario is that it's some mundane physics that can be explained, but we're sort of knocking on all the doors to try to figure out what those are.'
Sustainability Times
20-06-2025
- Science
- Sustainability Times
'Physics Broken in Antarctica': Mysterious Signal from Ice Baffles Scientists and Defies All Known Particle Laws
IN A NUTSHELL 🔍 ANITA experiment detected surprising signals suggesting particles traveling through the Earth in unexpected ways. detected surprising signals suggesting particles traveling through the Earth in unexpected ways. ❌ Neutrinos ruled out as the source of these anomalies due to the steep angles of the detected signals. as the source of these anomalies due to the steep angles of the detected signals. 🧪 Other major detectors, like IceCube and the Pierre Auger Observatory , found no matching evidence, adding to the mystery. and the , found no matching evidence, adding to the mystery. 🚀 A next-generation detector, PUEO, is being developed to further investigate these unexplained emissions. In the realm of particle physics, where established theories largely dictate expectations, the unexpected discovery made by the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment has sent ripples through the scientific community. ANITA, a cosmic ray detector, has picked up perplexing signals that challenge conventional understanding. These signals, recorded at steep upward angles, suggest particles have traversed the Earth in ways previously deemed impossible. As researchers delve deeper, the possibility of unknown particles or new interactions among known particles emerges, inviting a re-examination of established scientific beliefs. ANITA's Groundbreaking Discovery The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) is a balloon-borne experiment designed specifically to detect radio waves from cosmic rays interacting with Antarctic ice. Positioned approximately 25 miles above the icy surface, ANITA has a unique vantage point that allows it to listen for emissions produced by high-energy cosmic particles. The expectation is straightforward: detect neutrinos, the most elusive subatomic particles, as they interact with the ice. However, what ANITA detected defied these expectations. The signals appeared to rise through the Earth, a phenomenon that should not occur based on current particle physics models. Signals detected at angles as steep as 30 degrees below the horizon suggest these particles traveled through thousands of miles of solid rock before emerging from the ice. Such an occurrence challenges the very foundation of existing particle theories, raising the question of whether unknown forces are at play. 'Confirmed for the First Time': Scientists Turn Light Into a Never-Before-Seen Solid With Reality-Bending Quantum Properties Neutrinos Ruled Out as Source of Anomaly Neutrinos, nearly massless and chargeless particles, are known for their elusive nature. They pass through the universe, Earth, and even human bodies without much interaction. While they offer insights into cosmic events when detected, the ANITA signals did not behave like typical neutrino emissions. Stephanie Wissel from Penn State, who is part of the research team, noted that the detection of such signals from angles so steep suggests that these are not neutrinos. Wissel explained that neutrinos should not be able to travel through the Earth's crust without interacting. The fact that the signals were detected at all, given their steep angle, rules out neutrinos as the likely source. The scientific community is left grappling with these unexplained anomalies, as the math and physics behind the signals remain unfathomable under current models. 'Water Found Beyond Earth': Scientists Confirm It Formed Moments After the Big Bang in a Stunning Cosmic Revelation Other Detectors Found No Matching Evidence In an effort to corroborate ANITA's findings, researchers compared the data with results from other major neutrino detectors, such as IceCube in Antarctica and the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina. Unfortunately, neither of these experiments recorded signals similar to those captured by ANITA. This lack of supporting evidence adds to the intrigue, as it rules out most known particle sources. Extensive simulations and modeling were conducted to eliminate the possibility of background noise or known cosmic-ray signatures skewing the results. Yet, the signals remain anomalous, suggesting the presence of phenomena not accounted for by current scientific understanding. This situation has propelled researchers to consider the possibility of undiscovered particles or interactions. 'This Thing Shouldn't Exist': Scientists Stunned as Humanity Witnesses This Deep-Sea Monster Alive for the First Time Ever Next-Gen Detector May Solve the Mystery Looking to the future, Stephanie Wissel and her colleagues are developing a next-generation detector, known as PUEO, which promises to offer enhanced sensitivity and a better chance of identifying the source of these unusual emissions. With hopes that PUEO will detect more of these signals, researchers anticipate gaining insights into whether these anomalies indicate new physics or are simply rare environmental effects. Wissel remains hopeful that future flights will provide clarity. As she speculates that some interesting radio propagation effects might occur near ice and horizons, the scientific community eagerly awaits new data. The findings of this study, published in Physical Review Letters, underscore the importance of continually questioning established knowledge and pushing the boundaries of what is known. The mysterious signals detected by ANITA have opened the door to a realm of possibilities in particle physics, challenging established theories and inviting speculation about the unknown. As researchers prepare for future experiments with advanced detectors like PUEO, the scientific community stands on the brink of potential breakthroughs. Will these anomalies lead to a revolutionary understanding of particle physics, or will they simply reveal previously unconsidered environmental phenomena? The quest for answers continues. What groundbreaking discoveries might the next flight uncover, and how will they reshape our understanding of the universe? Our author used artificial intelligence to enhance this article. Did you like it? 4.3/5 (26)
