Astronomers are strategizing to transform a vast area of the Pacific Ocean into an enormous neutrino detector.

Among the most elusive subatomic particles, neutrinos rank second only to the truly exotic dark matter. They are synthesized in abundance and are involved in the nuclear force, fusion, and decay. Neutrinos participate in all nuclear reactions. For instance, sun’s core is a giant nuclear fusion process that should naturally emit a lot of neutrinos. According to earlier studies, if you lift your thumb up to the sun, approximately 60 billion neutrinos will pass through it per second. Neutrinos only rarely and rarely interact with matter, and while billions of them pass through the body each second, the total number of neutrinos that interact with the body in a lifetime is approximately equal to one.

It was even theorized that neutrinos had no mass at all and were capable of moving at the speed of light as they are extremely light and active particles. However, as mountains of data accumulated, scientists realized that neutrinos do possess a little amount of mass.

The exact amount of mass is currently under research and discovery through scientific analysis. There are three types of neutrinos: electrons, muons, and tau neutrinos. Each of these ‘flavors’ engages in different kinds of nuclear processes, and – more inconveniently – all three kinds of neutrinos can and apparently do change their stripes as they go. Thus, if you can see a neutrino and define its nature, you will know but a tip of the iceberg of what you would love to know.

Whispers in water

Currently, the most widely accepted theory of fundamental interactions is the Standard Model, but it does not reveal the causes of neutrino mass. So physicists would want to accomplish two things: gather data on the three types of neutrinos and determine where in the neutrino those masses are situated. This means they have to be very experimental a lot of the time. Most neutrino detectors are very simple: you either erect a gadget to produce an obscene number of the critters in a lab or construct thousands of antennae to capture any of them that come through space from here on. These experiments have become more complex and scaled up in the following generations of the experiments. For instance, the Kamiokande experiment in Japan famously detected neutrinos from the supernova 1987A. But to do so, they require a vat of almost 50,000 tons of water, which violates the principle stated above.

In more recent years, experiments like the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica have really set the tone. That one is a cubic kilometer of ice observatory at the South Pole, containing several hundred Eiffel Tower-sized pieces of receivers 1 km deep in ice.

IceCube analysis has recently detected several of the highest energy neutrinos ever observed and has begun probing the earliest stages of their source identification process in around ten years of investigation. (Hint: It also incorporates exceptionally energetic objects in the universe, like blazars.

Why do Kamiokande and IceCube consume so much water? A huge chunk of almost anything may be used as a neutrino detector, although pure water works best. When one of the millions of traveling neutrinos hits a random water molecule, it emits a short flash of light. The observatories include hundreds of photoreceptors, and the cleanliness of the water allows those detectors to identify the direction, angle, and strength of the flash with great accuracy. (If the water had pollutants, it would be impossible to determine where the flash originated within the volume.)

From there, they can determine the initial direction of the arriving neutrino and its energy.

The great Pacific neutrino patch

This is all fine for neutrinos that occur naturally. However the highest energetic neutrinos are relatively rare. They are also the hardest to find neutrinos, and they are also the most fascinating and interesting neutrinos because they are produced only by the most violent and energetic processes in the Universe.

However, even with a decade of observation, IceCube has detected only a few of these incredibly potent neutrinos. I am telling you, we will need a bigger boat. This is the concept behind the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE), a novel proposal presented in an article published in November on the preprint service arXiv: turn a huge portion of the Pacific Ocean into nature’s own neutrino detector. Once again, the premise is shockingly simple: find an appropriate, uninhabited island in the Pacific.

Develop large strands of photodetectors – a kilometer or more in length. Bury these strands at the bottom of the sea if possible in regions that are over a mile (2 km) deep. Anchor them so that they could float on the water and remain in vertical position just like massive mechanical seaweed.

The P-ONE architecture is currently composed of seven 10-string clusters, with 20 optical components per string. This makes it a total of 1,400 photodetectors drifting in a area of the Pacific several miles wide which gives it much larger coverage area compared to IceCube. When it has been established, the only thing that can be done is to wait and see. Even the neutrinos will interact with the water and will produce a small flash which the detectors will follow. Of course, it is much easier said than done.

The strands will be in constant motion, moving back and forth with the water itself. The Pacific Ocean has substances within it such as salt, plankton and fish droppings. This will change the refraction of light between the strands and make it difficult to have any accurate measurement.

That means that the experiment will need continual calibration to account for all of these factors and successfully trace neutrinos. However, the team behind P-ONE is already planning to develop a smaller, two-strand prototype as a proof of concept.

And then, we can go neutrino hunting.

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