A friend in the physics department of Wichita State University received big-time publicity, this morning, at the top of the front page of The Wichita Eagle newspaper. I've previously posted about Nick's work with/on neutrinos and the grants that he has been awarded by NASA in Elusive Neutrino, in So far this week...., and probably in other postings long-since forgotten.
From later in the newspaper article, the writer says, "Current methods of studying neutrinos require building giant detectors in the hopes that a neutrino will interact with one of the particles in the detector and scientists can detect that interaction." Amusingly, the writer quotes another professor from Kansas State University, Tim Bolton [Director of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE)], "...neutrino detectors tend to be very, very large. Basically these detectors are about the size of small naval warships.”
Nick's logic was that the difficult-to-detect but abundant neutrinos could be detected within a smaller chamber if that chamber were positioned much closer to the nearest great neutrino source, our sun - say 3 million miles away, the distance at which NASA has orbiting satellites that study the sun, where the neutrino density is about 1,000 times the density on earth.
Artist’s depiction of what a future mission using Solomey’s detector might look like.
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