Deep beneath the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, physicists have detected an incredible subatomic particle – an ultra-high energy neutrino. This discovery was an important step in investigating how particles reach such exorbitant speeds.
Record neutrino
A team of 350 scientists, using the KM3NeT neutrino telescope, detected a neutrino with an energy of 220 petaelectronvolts (PeV). This is tens of thousands of times the energy that the largest particle booster, the Large Hadron Collider, can create.
“We believe this is the most energetic neutrino ever recorded on Earth,” reported Paul de Jong, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam.
Neutrinos were known for their “invisibility”: these nearly weightless particles have no charge and almost no interaction with matter. They permeate everything from stars to human bodies and remain elusive to most instruments. This is what makes them ideal “conduits” to the sources of the cosmic accelerants that create them.
Catching the “elusive” particle
KM3NeT, a still unfinished neutrino telescope installed at a depth of a few kilometers in the Mediterranean Sea, has already proven its effectiveness. It consists of strings of light-sensitive sensors attached to the seafloor that capture the light trails of particles. In February 2023, the telescope detected a characteristic trace of a muon, a particle produced when a neutrino interacts with rock or water. This muon left a bright blue photon trail in the dark water, allowing scientists to reconstruct the neutrino’s path and determine its energy.
Doubts and confirmations
Since the first neutrino detection, it took two years to analyze the data. The record was previously held by the IceCube neutrino observatory in Antarctica, which detected a particle with an energy of 10 PeV in 2014. The KM3NeT results caused skepticism among scientists because of the particle’s extreme energy and the early stage of the telescope’s operation.
“We haven’t seen anything like this in 10 years of observations,” said Eric Blaufuss of IceCube. However, the confirmation of the discovery has added confidence in the capabilities of new instruments to detect neutrinos.
Questions that remain to be answered
Researchers believe that neutrinos could have been formed by processes around supermassive black holes, gamma-ray bursts, or even in the interaction of charged particles with relic radiation, a remnant of the Big Bang. These particles carry valuable information about the evolution of the Universe.
The KM3NeT team is working to determine the exact origin of neutrinos. Future plans call for the telescope to be completed by 2028, which will allow the detection of even more particles of similar energy.
“This discovery confirms that these particles are not just theoretical. They are real! They exist!” Paul de Jong said.
Earlier we reported on how the discovery of neutrino interactions brought scientists closer to unraveling the mystery of dark matter.
According to Science Alert
