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Tag Archives: Produced
Manish Sisodia’s CBI Custody Ends, To Be Produced In Court Today: 10 Facts – NDTV
- Manish Sisodia’s CBI Custody Ends, To Be Produced In Court Today: 10 Facts NDTV
- 9 Opposition parties write to PM Modi over ‘blatant misuse’ of Central agencies; slam Sisodia’s arrest The Tribune India
- ‘Both Congress, BJP want all other political parties to cease to exist,’ claims AAP Deccan Herald
- Vandita Mishra writes | Sisodia arrest, targeting of CPR: The state is thin skinned and strong armed The Indian Express
- Big Blow For Former Delhi DY CM Manish Sisodia, CBI Seeks Sisodia’s 3 Days Of Additional Custody India Today
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‘The Late Late Show With James Corden’ To Be Replaced With ‘@midnight’ Reboot Exec Produced By Stephen Colbert On CBS – Deadline
- ‘The Late Late Show With James Corden’ To Be Replaced With ‘@midnight’ Reboot Exec Produced By Stephen Colbert On CBS Deadline
- The Late Late Show With James Corden to Be Replaced by @Midnight Reboot at CBS; Chris Hardwick Not Attached TVLine
- CBS to Replace James Corden’s ‘Late Late Show’ With Stephen Colbert-Backed ‘@midnight’ Reboot Hollywood Reporter
- The Late Late Show to Be Replaced by Reboot of Fan-Favorite Series After James Corden Exit ComicBook.com
- CBS Eyes Reboot of ‘@midnight’ to Replace ’The Late Late Show With James Corden’ Variety
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Key cause of type 2 diabetes confirmed: Chemicals produced to break down sugar worsens condition
How high blood sugar REALLY causes type 2 diabetes: Chemicals produced when glucose is broken down are to blame, study finds
- Oxford University researchers looked into how type 2 diabetes progresses
- Found chemicals released when sugar is broken down cause patients’ decline
- Discovery could lead to new treatments that could slow the condition’s effects
For decades, scientists have been puzzled over how exactly high blood sugar causes type 2 diabetes.
But Oxford University researchers may finally have the answer.
Tests revealed it wasn’t the elevated glucose levels that were directly to blame for the pancreas being robbed of its insulin-making ability.
Instead, they found glucose metabolites — the chemicals released when sugar is broken down — rather than glucose itself is behind the decline.
The discovery could lead to diabetes patients being given new treatments to slow down glucose metabolism, preventing the condition getting worse, they said.
Type 2 diabetes affects approximately 2million people in Britain and 37million in the US. It occurs when blood sugar is too high, which can lead to complications including blindness, kidney failure and nerve damage if left uncontrolled.
Patients are currently encouraged to eat well and exercise to maintain a healthy weight to slow its progression.
Medication like Glucophage to improve insulin function is usually prescribed later on if diet and exercise is not effective alone.
However, the latest research could lead to new drugs that could stop the disease getting to that point in the first place.
Oxford University researchers found glucose metabolites — the chemicals released when sugar is broke down — rather than glucose itself is behind type 2 diabetes progression
Co-author Professor Frances Ashcroft, a physiologist, said: ‘This is potentially a useful way to try to prevent beta-cell decline in diabetes.
‘Because glucose metabolism normally stimulates insulin secretion, it was previously hypothesised that increasing glucose metabolism would enhance insulin secretion in T2D [type 2 diabetes] and glucokinase activators were trialled, with varying results.’
She added: ‘Our data suggests that glucokinase activators could have an adverse effect and, somewhat counter-intuitively, that a glucokinase inhibitor might be a better strategy to treat T2D.
‘Of course, it would be important to reduce glucose flux in T2D to that found in people without diabetes — and no further.
‘But there is a very long way to go before we can tell if this approach would be useful for treating beta-cell decline in T2D.
‘In the meantime, the key message from our study if you have type 2 diabetes is that it is important to keep your blood glucose well controlled.’
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, looked at the effects of hypoglycaemia — high blood sugar — in diabetic mice.
They measured how much insulin the mice released when given sugar for those with low blood glucose and those with chronic hypoglycaemia.
Mice were given drugs that blocked glucokinase — an enzyme that aids the break down of blood glucose — for two days to see whether it was glucose or the break down of glucose that causes the normally lower levels of insulin in those with hypoglycaemia.
Results showed the drug had little effect on the low blood sugar mice but ‘largely prevented the dramatic reduction in GSIS and insulin content produced by chronic hyperglycaemia’.
This lower levels of insulin in those with hypoglacaemia was being caused by the breakdown of glucose, not the sugar itself, the team said.
When people eat carbohydrates, the food is broken down into blood sugar. This tells the pancreas to release insulin, which allows glucose to enter the body’s cells.
But over time, high blood sugar levels can cause insulin resistance.
Because the insulin isn’t as effective at breaking down the sugars, it causes the body to produce more and more of it.
Eventually, this leads to the pancreas becoming worn out, sending the system out of whack and causing blood sugar levels to stay high.
Tonga underwater volcanic eruption produced the highest plume on RECORD, study reveals
The Tonga volcanic eruption in January produced the highest ever recorded plume, scientists have confirmed.
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, an underwater volcano in the South Pacific, released an ash cloud that was 187,000 feet (57 km/35 miles) high.
Its colossal eruption on January 15 this year was also the first recorded to have broken through into the third layer of the atmosphere – the mesosphere.
The mesosphere starts about 160,000 feet (48 km) above us, and is where passing meteors start to burn up and form shooting stars.
Researchers from the University of Oxford and RAL Space used three geostationary weather satellites to accurately measure the massive plume’s height.
The previous record-holder, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, caused a plume that was recorded as 131,000 feet (40 km/ 25 miles) high.
‘It’s an extraordinary result as we have never seen a cloud of any type this tall before,’ said lead author Dr Simon Proud.
‘Furthermore, the ability to estimate the height in the way we did, using the parallax method, is only possible now that we have good satellite coverage.
‘It wouldn’t have been possible a decade or so ago.’
Parallax-based retrievals of plume altitude at 04:30 GMT on 15 January 2022 overlaid on Himawari-8 data for the same time frame
WHAT IS THE ‘PARALLAX EFFECT’?
The parallax effect is the difference in the apparent location of an object viewed along two different lines of sight.
You can see this effect by closing your right eye, and holding out one hand with the thumb raised upwards.
If you then switch eyes, so that your left is closed and your right is open, your thumb will appear to shift slightly against the background.
Astronomers use this effect to measure large distances, like between the Earth and stars.
The parallax effect
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The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption took place in the southern Pacific Ocean, around 40 miles (65km) from Tonga’s main island.
It triggered a 7.4 magnitude earthquake, sending tsunami waves crashing into the island that were felt as far away as Russia, the United States and Chile.
The eruption released more energy than the Tsar Bomba – the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated – and blasted 20,000 Olympic swimming pools-worth of water into the stratosphere.
For the study, published today in Science, scientists wanted to accurately measure how far the towering column of ash and water produced stretched into the atmosphere.
Normally, this is done by measuring the temperature of the top of the plume using infrared-based satellites and comparing it to standard temperatures at different known altitudes.
This can be done because previous plumes have only extended into the troposphere, the first layer of the atmosphere, where temperature decreases with height.
However, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai cloud went into the third layer of the atmosphere, the mesosphere.
Due to the ozone layer absorbing solar ultraviolet radiation, temperatures in the stratosphere and mesosphere actually increase with height.
So, to measure the plume, Dr Proud’s team developed a different technique that utilises the ‘parallax effect’ – the difference in the apparent location of an object viewed along two different lines of sight.
This technique allows researchers to calculate the distance between the object and both viewers.
The location of the Tonga volcano is covered by three weather satellites, all 22,000 miles (36,000 km) up in space – the GOES-17 from the US, Himawari-8 from Japan and GeoKompSat-2A from South Korea.
Aerial shots taken by these satellites of known location were used to gauge the plume’s height.
On top of that, they recorded images every ten minutes, meaning the researchers could document rapid changes in the plume’s trajectory.
Dr Proud said: ‘Thirty years ago, when Pinatubo erupted, our satellites were nowhere near as good as they are now. They could only scan the earth every 30 minutes. Or maybe even every hour.’
Evolution of volcanic plume altitude over time. Infrared (IR) heights are derived from Himawari-8 satellite measurements and known temperature standards from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. The blue lines indicate altitudes estimated by the stereoscopic method across the entire plume, and the green markers are parallax heights derived from a manual analysis of data from Himawari-8, GK-2A, and GOES-17 satellites
An animation showing the evolution of the height of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption plume, measured using the stereoscopic method applied to images from three weather satellites.
Dr Proud also speculates that the estimation for the Mount Pinatubo eruption could be incorrect as a result of the reduced satellite data available at the time.
He said: ‘We think for Pinatubo we actually missed the peak of the activity and the points where it went the highest – it fell between two of the satellite images and we missed it.’
The researchers now intend to construct an automated system to compute the heights of volcano plumes using the parallax method.
They hope that a dataset of plume heights will help other scientists model the dispersion of volcanic ash in the atmosphere.
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption took place in the southern Pacific Ocean, around 40 miles (65km) from the country’s main island
Its colossal eruption on January 15 this year was the first recorded to have broken through into the third layer of the atmosphere – the mesosphere. It also caused many effects, like atmospheric waves, extreme winds and unusual electric currents, that were felt around the world and into space
The previous record-holder, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, caused a plume that was recorded as 131,000 feet (40 km/ 25 miles) high (pictured)
Herschel Walker Doubles Down on Cop Badge He Produced During Georgia Debate, Says ‘It’s Real’
U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker has defiantly claimed again that the cop badge he pulled out at Friday’s debate is real and that he has been “working with law enforcement for years,” including training, leadership, and health and wellness programs.
After copping heat online for the stunt, where he was criticized for producing a prop during the debate, the Georgia Republican sat down with NBC News’ Kristen Welker for an interview airing in part Monday on Today. In it, he says he has an “honorary sheriff badge” for Chatham County, Johnson County, and Cobb County with “limited rights.”
“That’s a badge that I was given by a police officer, and I do have the badge I carry with me all the time. It’s a real badge. It’s not a fake badge. It is a real badge,” Walker says in the interview, according to a transcript obtained by The Daily Beast.
Questions surrounding the former NFL star’s alleged work with law enforcement have plagued his Senate campaign, including a June article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that indicates there is no real evidence to prove Walker’s longtime claims that he has worked alongside the FBI or police.
During Sunday evening’s debate, which Walker declined to attend and was represented by an empty podium, opponent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) said Walker doesn’t tell the truth, using Friday night’s badge incident as an example of his lies.
“The other night when I said, ‘You keep pretending to be a police officer,’ he presented a badge as if that were proof that he really is a police officer,” Warnock said. “Now he wants us to think that he’s a senator. I think the people of Georgia are wise and discerning, and they know that at the end of the day, I know who I work for: I work for them.”
In the NBC interview, Welker asks Walker, “Who gave you that badge?”
Walker responds: “This badge is from, um—this badge. I have badges from all over the—all over Georgia, even from Chatham County. I had to wait—wait—I had from Chatham County, which is a county, which is a county, uh, which is a county from…”
At this point Walker shows the badge again, but it is unfortunately upside down.
“Oh, I have it upside down. Right, which is a county from where Sen. Warnock is from. I have an honorary sheriff badge for that county with limited rights.”
Welker presses Walker on where the badge he is holding is from.
“This is from my hometown,” Walker says.
“This is from Johnson County, from the sheriff from Johnson County, which is a legit badge. Everyone can make fun, but this badge give me the right… If anything happened in this county, I have the right to work with the police getting things done. People that don’t know that—I’ve been working with law enforcement for years. I do training program, but they get to get credit for it. I do a program, a leadership program. I do health and wellness programs. I visit prisons so, everyone will make fun, but I’ve been—have my men and women in black—men and women in blue backs since I’ve been doing this.”
When asked if the badge confers any arresting authority, Walker confirms it is an “honorary badge,” but that “they can call me whenever they want me and I have the authority to do things for them to work with them all day.”
Then, Welker tells Walker directly that “The National Sheriffs Association said an honorary badge… ‘is for the trophy case’ and asks, ‘why make the decision to flash it at the debate?’”
Walker answers: “That is totally not true. You can call the guy that gave me the badge… call the woman who gave me the badge and the same thing is, I tell you one thing they’re having fun in. They said I wasn’t working with Cobb County police, right? The Cobb County Sheriff Police.”
Walker appears to be referencing a Walker campaign spokeswoman’s claims to the Journal-Constitution that Walker is an honorary deputy in Cobb County, though the Cobb County Police Department told the newspaper it had no records to back up the claim.
“And this is the way people do news media,” Walker continues. “And I had the sheriff that gave me the badge and been there for years, been there for years came out and did a press conference with me and said, ‘Herschel has been with us for years, he’d been working with us.’”
Walker claimed the media “wasn’t listening to anything and want to try to find an excuse.”
He said: “No, I will always have my men and women in blue. That’s the reason they support me. I have more… more sheriffs that have supported Herschel Walker in Georgia than any candidate running today.”
Exercise pill? Researchers identify molecule in blood produced during workout
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Researchers at Baylor and Stanford Universities say they have reached an important step toward condensing some of the benefits of exercise into a simple pill.
The researchers, Baylor Professor of Pediatrics, Dr. Yong Xu, and Stanford assistant Professor of Pathology, Dr. Jonathan Long, say they have identified a molecule produced in the blood during exercise that has successfully reduced food intake and obesity in mice, according to the Baylor College of Medicine.
“Regular exercise has been proven to help weight loss, regulate appetite and improve the metabolic profile, especially for people who are overweight and obese,” Xu said. “If we can understand the mechanism by which exercise triggers these benefits, then we are closer to helping many people improve their health.”
10-MINUTE RUN BENEFITS MOOD, BRAIN FUNCTION: STUDY
FILE – Anandi Cade lifts weights at Fitness SF on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, Dec. 29, 2021.
(Scott Strazzante / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
“We wanted to understand how exercise works at the molecular level to be able to capture some of its benefits,” added Long. “For example, older or frail people who cannot exercise enough, may one day benefit from taking a medication that can help slow down osteoporosis, heart disease or other conditions.”
WE MAY NOT NEED 10,000 DAILY STEPS FOR LONG LIFE, STUDIES SUGGEST
The pair of researchers identified an amino acid referred to as Lac-Phe. When they gave doses of the amino acid to mice that were fed a high fat diet, they observed a 50% decrease in food intake over the subsequent 12 hours, according to Baylor.
The researchers also found that humans, and even race horses, produce the same amino acid when undergoing strenuous physical activity.
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“Our next steps include finding more details about how Lac-Phe mediates its effects in the body, including the brain,” Xu told Baylor. “Our goal is to learn to modulate this exercise pathway for therapeutic interventions.”
Physicists Detect Mysterious X Particles in ‘Primordial Soup’ For The First Time
A mysterious particle thought to have existed briefly just after the Big Bang has now been detected for the first time in the ‘primordial soup’.
Specifically, in a medium called the quark-gluon plasma, generated in the Large Hadron Collider by colliding lead ions. There, amid the trillions of particles produced by these collisions, physicists managed to tease out 100 of the exotic motes known as X particles.
“This is just the start of the story,” says physicist Yen-Jie Lee of MIT, and a member of the international CMS Collaboration headquartered at CERN in Switzerland.
“We’ve shown we can find a signal. In the next few years we want to use the quark-gluon plasma to probe the X particle’s internal structure, which could change our view of what kind of material the universe should produce.”
Mere moments after the Big Bang, the very early Universe wasn’t made of the same stuff we see floating around today. Instead, for a few millionths of a second, it was filled with plasma superheated to trillions of degrees, consisting of elementary particles called quarks and gluons. That’s the quark-gluon plasma.
In less time than it takes to blink, the plasma cooled and the particles came together to form the protons and neutrons of which normal matter is constructed today. But in that very brief twitch of time, the particles in the quark-gluon plasma collided, stuck together, and came apart again in different configurations.
One of those configurations is a particle so mysterious, we don’t even know how it’s put together. This is the X particle, and it’s only been seen very rarely and briefly in particle colliders – too briefly to be probed.
Theoretically, however, X particles could appear in the very small flashes of quark-gluon plasma that physicists have been creating in particle accelerators for some years now. And this might afford a better opportunity to understand them.
During the Large Hadron Collider’s 2018 run, positively charged atoms of lead were slammed together at high speeds. Each of these roughly 13 billion collisions produced a shower of tens of thousands of particles. That’s a dauntingly colossal amount of data to sift through.
“Theoretically speaking, there are so many quarks and gluons in the plasma that the production of X particles should be enhanced,” Lee says. “But people thought it would be too difficult to search for them because there are so many other particles produced in this quark soup.”
Although X particles are very short-lived, when they decay, they produce a shower of lower-mass particles. To streamline the data analysis process, the team developed an algorithm to recognize the patterns characteristic of X particle decay. Then they fed the 2018 LHC data into their software.
The algorithm identified a signal at a specific mass that indicated the presence of around 100 X particles in the data. This is an excellent start.
“It’s almost unthinkable that we can tease out these 100 particles from this huge dataset,” Lee said.
At this point, the data are insufficient to learn more about the X-particle’s structure, but the discovery could bring us closer. Now that we know how to find the X-particle’s signature, teasing it out in future data sets should be a lot easier. In turn, the more data we have available, the easier it will be to make sense of them.
Protons and neutrons are each made up of three quarks. Physicists believe that X particles may be made of four – either an exotic, tightly bound particle known as a tetraquark, or a new kind of loosely bound particle made from two mesons, each of which contain two quarks. If it’s the former, because it’s more tightly bound, it will decay more slowly than the latter.
“Currently our data is consistent with both because we don’t have enough statistics yet. In the next few years we’ll take much more data so we can separate these two scenarios,” Lee says.
“That will broaden our view of the kinds of particles that were produced abundantly in the early Universe.”
The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.
Origin May Be Biologically Produced Methane
A selfie taken by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover on Sol 2291 at the “Rock Hall” drill site, located on Vera Rubin Ridge. Reduced carbon released from powder from this drill hole was strongly depleted in carbon 13, the surprising carbon isotopic signature reported by the team. The selfie is composed of 57 individual images taken by the rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a camera on the end of the rover’s robotic arm. Credit: NASA/Caltech-JPL/MSSS
The image shows the Highfield drill hole on Vera Rubin Ridge. Drill powder from this hole showed carbon isotope values indicating a carbon cycle that includes either subsurface life, intense UV radiation penetrating the atmosphere, or Interstellar dust. The image was taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager on sol 2247. Credit: NASA/Caltech-JPL/MSSS
Curiosity, which is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, has spent the last nine years exploring an area of Gale Crater that has exposed layers of ancient rock. The rover drilled into the surface of these layers and recovered samples from buried sedimentary layers. Curiosity heated the samples in the absence of oxygen to separate any chemicals. Spectrographic analysis of a portion of the reduced carbon produced by this pyrolysis showed a wide range of carbon 12 and carbon 13 amounts depending on where or when the original sample formed. Some carbon was exceptionally depleted in carbon 13 while other carbon samples where enriched.
“The samples extremely depleted in carbon 13 are a little like samples from Australia taken from sediment that was 2.7 billion years old,” said House. “Those samples were caused by biological activity when methane was consumed by ancient microbial mats, but we can’t necessarily say that on Mars because it’s a planet that may have formed out of different materials and processes than Earth.”
To explain the exceptionally depleted samples, the researchers suggest three possibilities — a cosmic dust cloud, ultraviolet radiation breaking down carbon dioxide, or ultraviolet degradation of biologically created methane.
According to House, every couple of hundred million years the solar system passes through a galactic molecular cloud.
“It doesn’t deposit a lot of dust,” said House. “It is hard to see any of these deposition events in the Earth record.”
To create a layer that Curiosity could sample, the galactic dust cloud would have first lowered the temperature on a Mars that still contained water and created glaciers. The dust would have deposited on top of the ice and would then need to remain in place once the glacier melted, leaving behind a layer of dirt that included the carbon.
So far, there is limited evidence of past glaciers at Gale Crater on Mars. According to the researchers, “this explanation is plausible, but it requires additional research.”
A second possible explanation for lower amounts of carbon 13 is the ultraviolet conversion of carbon dioxide to organic compounds like formaldehyde.
“There are papers that predict that UV could cause this type of fractionation,” said House. “However, we need more experimental results showing this size fractionation so we can rule in or rule out this explanation.”
The third possible method of producing carbon 13 depleted samples has a biological basis.
On Earth, a strongly carbon 13 depleted signature from a paleosurface would indicate past microbes consumed microbially produced methane. Ancient Mars may have had large plumes of methane being released from the subsurface where methane production would have been energetically favorable. Then, the released methane would either be consumed by surface microbes or react with ultraviolet light and be deposited directly on the surface.
However, according to the researchers, there is currently no sedimentary evidence of surface microbes on the past Mars landscape, and so the biological explanation highlighted in the paper relies on ultraviolet light to place the carbon 13 signal onto the ground.
“All three possibilities point to an unusual carbon cycle unlike anything on Earth today,” said House. “But we need more data to figure out which of these is the correct explanation. It would be nice if the rover would detect a large methane plume and measure the carbon isotopes from that, but while there are methane plumes, most are small, and no rover has sampled one large enough for the isotopes to be measured.”
House also notes that finding the remains of microbial mats or evidence of glacial deposits could also clear things up, a bit.
“We are being cautious with our interpretation, which is the best course when studying another world,” said House.
Curiosity is still collecting and analyzing samples and will be returning to the pediment where it found some of the samples in this study in about a month.
“This research accomplished a long-standing goal for Mars exploration,” said House. “To measure different carbon isotopes — one of the most important geology tools — from sediment on another habitable world, and it does so by looking at 9 years of exploration.”
Reference: “Depleted carbon isotope compositions observed at Gale crater, Mars” 17 January 2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Also working on the project from Penn State was Gregory M. Wong, recent doctoral recipient in geosciences.
Other participants in the research were, at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Christopher R. Webster, fellow and senior research scientist; Gregory J. Flesch, scientific applications software engineer; and Amy E. Hofmann, research scientist; at Solar System Exploration Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center: Heather B. Franz, research scientist; Jennifer C. Stern, research assistant; Alex Pavlov, space scientist; Jennifer L. Eigenbrode, research assistant; Daniel P. Glavin, associate director for strategic science; Charles A. Malespin, chief, Planetary Environments Laboratory; and Paul R. Mahaffy, Retired Solar System Exploration Division Director; at University of Michigan: Sushil K. Atreya, professor of climate and space sciences and engineering and director of the Planetary Science Laboratory; at Carnegie Institution for Science: Andrew Steele, scientist; and at Georgetown University and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center: Maëva Milan, postdoctoral fellow.
NASA supported this project.
Physicists Detect Elusive ‘Ghost Particles’ in The LHC For The Very First Time
A major milestone in particle physics has just been made at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
For the first time, candidate neutrinos have been detected, not just at the LHC, but in any particle collider.
The six neutrino interactions, detected using the neutrino subdetector FASERnu, not only demonstrate the feasibility of the technology, they open up a new avenue for studying these mysterious particles, particularly at high energies.
“Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider,” said physicist Jonathan Feng of the University of California Irvine, co-leader of the FASER Collaboration.
“This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the Universe.”
Neutrinos are actually everywhere. They’re one of the most abundant subatomic particles in the Universe; but they carry no charge and have almost zero mass so, although they stream through the Universe at almost the speed of light, they barely interact with it at all. Billions of the things are streaming through you right now. To a neutrino, the rest of the Universe is basically incorporeal; that’s why they’re also known as ghost particles.
Although they interact rarely, that’s not the same as never. Detectors such as IceCube in Antarctica, Super-Kamiokande in Japan, and MiniBooNE at Fermilab in Illinois use sensitive photodetector arrays designed to pick up the showers of light that emerge when a neutrino interacts with other particles in a completely dark environment, for example.
But for a long time, scientists have wanted to also study neutrinos produced at particle colliders. That’s because collider neutrinos, which emerge primarily from the decay of hadrons, are produced at very high energies, which are not very well studied. Detecting collider neutrinos provides access to neutrino energies and types that are rarely seen elsewhere.
FASERnu is what is known as an emulsion detector. Lead and tungsten plates are alternated with layers of emulsion: During particle experiments at the LHC, neutrinos can collide with nuclei in the lead and tungsten plates, producing particles that leave tracks in the emulsion layers, a bit like the way ionizing radiation makes tracks in a cloud chamber.
The plates need to be developed like photographic film. Then, physicists can analyze the particle trails to find out what produced them; whether it was a neutrino, and then what the neutrino’s ‘flavor’, or type, was. There are three neutrino flavors – electron, muon and tau – as well as their antineutrino counterparts.
In the FASERnu pilot run conducted in 2018, six candidate neutrino interactions were recorded in the emulsion layers. That may not seem like many, considering how many particles are produced in a run at the LHC, but it gave the collaboration two vital pieces of information.
“First, it verified that the position forward of the ATLAS interaction point at the LHC is the right location for detecting collider neutrinos,” Feng said. “Second, our efforts demonstrated the effectiveness of using an emulsion detector to observe these kinds of neutrino interactions.”
The pilot detector was a relatively small apparatus, at around 29 kilograms (64 pounds). The team is currently working on the full version, around 1,100 kilograms (over 2,400 pounds). This instrument will be significantly more sensitive, and will allow the researchers to differentiate between neutrino flavors and their antineutrino counterparts.
They’re expecting that the third observing run of the Large Hadron Collider will produce 200 billion electron neutrinos, 6 trillion muon neutrinos, and 9 billion tau neutrinos, and their antineutrinos. Since we’ve only detected around 10 tau neutrinos, total, to date, this will be a pretty big deal.
The collaboration is also eyeing even more elusive prey. They have their hopes pinned on a detection of dark photons, which are at the moment hypothetical, but which could help reveal the nature of dark matter, the mysterious directly-undetectable mass that makes up most of the Universe’s matter.
But the neutrino detections alone are a tremendously exciting step forward for our understanding of the fundamental components of the Universe.
“Given the power of our new detector and its prime location at CERN, we expect to be able to record more than 10,000 neutrino interactions in the next run of the LHC, beginning in 2022,” said physicist and astronomer David Casper of the University of California, Irvine, FASER project co-leader.
“We will detect the highest-energy neutrinos that have ever been produced from a human-made source.”
The team’s research has been published in Physical Review D.