Neutrino detectors don’t grow on trees. Or do they? Forests could one day be used to spot ultra-high-energy neutrinos, a physicist proposes. that pick up radio waves produced by certain interactions of the difficult-to-detect subatomic particles, astroparticle physicist Steven Prohira proposes in a paper submitted January 25 at arXiv.org.
Neutrinos typically demand large, sensitive detectors. That’s especially true for detectors designed to snag the rarest, highest-energy neutrinos that shower down on Earth from space. Building such enormous detectors from scratch is a major hurdle. using a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, and the Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope, KM3NeT, currently under construction, will search for neutrinos interacting in the Mediterranean Sea . These detectors have large enough volumes to make catching rare high-energy neutrinos possible.
Given the enormous undertaking involved in building that type of detector, “it dawned on me that it’d be cool if the antennas were already there,” says Prohira, of the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Previous research had shown that trees can pick up radio waves. Detecting those radio waves would require nailing a wire into each tree or wrapping a coil of wire around each tree’s trunk and connecting that to electronics to read out the signals.
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