Sloan Foundation Among Funders of World’s Smallest Neutrino Detector That Found A Big Physics Fingerprint
After more than a year of operation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the COHERENT experiment, using the world’s smallest neutrino detector, has found a big fingerprint of the elusive, electrically neutral particles that interact only weakly with matter.
The research, performed at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source and published in the journal Science, provides compelling evidence for a neutrino interaction process predicted by theorists 43 years ago but never seen.
“The one-of-a-kind particle physics experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was the first to measure coherent scattering of low-energy neutrinos off nuclei,” said ORNL physicist Jason Newby, technical coordinator and one of 11 ORNL participants in COHERENT, a collaboration of 80 researchers from 19 institutions and four nations. . .