Scientists are closing in on why the universe exists | 24CA News
54:00[Hunting] Ghost Particles
Particle astrophysicist Benjamin Tam hopes his work will assist us perceive a query. A really large one.
“The big question that we are trying to answer with this research is how the universe was formed,” stated Tam, who’s ending his PhD at Queen’s University.
“What is the origin of the universe?”
And to reply that query, he and dozens of fellow scientists and engineers are conducting a multi-million greenback experiment two kilometres under the floor of the Canadian Shield in a repurposed mine close to Sudbury, Ontario.
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNOLAB) is already well-known for an earlier experiment that exposed how neutrinos ‘oscillate’ between totally different variations of themselves as they journey right here from the solar.
This discovering proved an important level: the mass of a neutrino can’t be zero. The experiment’s lead scientist, Arthur McDonald, shared the Nobel Prize in 2015 for this discovery.
The neutrino is often often called the ‘ghost particle.’ Trillions upon trillions of them emanate from the solar each second. To people, they’re imperceptible besides via extremely specialised detection know-how that alerts us to their presence.
Neutrinos had been first hypothesized within the early twentieth century to clarify why sure essential physics equations constantly produced what regarded just like the fallacious solutions. In 1956, they had been confirmed to exist.
Tam and his fellow researchers at the moment are homing in on the most important remaining thriller about these tiny particles.
Nobody is aware of what occurs when two neutrinos collide. If it may be proven that they generally zap one another out of existence, scientists might conclude {that a} neutrino acts as its personal ‘antiparticle’.
Such a conclusion would clarify how an imbalance arose between matter and anti-matter, thus clarifying the present existence of all of the matter within the universe.
Guests on this episode (so as of look):
Benjamin Tam is a PhD pupil in Particle Astrophysics at Queen’s University.
Eve Vavagiakis is a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow within the Physics Department at Cornell University. She’s the writer of a kids’s e-book, I’m A Neutrino: Tiny Particles in a Big Universe.
Blaire Flynn is the senior training and outreach officer at SNOLAB.
Erica Caden is a analysis scientist at SNOLAB. Among her duties she is the detector supervisor for SNO+, accountable for holding issues operating everyday.
*This episode was produced by Nicola Luksic and Tom Howell. It is a part of an on-going sequence, IDEAS from the Trenches, some tales are under.
