"I can only guess that it is meant to be sold abroad," says Vladimir Gavrin, the Russian head of SAGE. The fuel ministry won't reveal its plans for the gallium, although researchers suspect that it would be sold to pay wages at state businesses. Bringing the gallium to the surface, they say, would not only kill SAGE, but also contaminate the highly purified metal and render it useless for future research. SAGE researchers replied that they would rather burn themselves in the mine shaft. Initial results from the detectors, published in the early 1990s, confirmed the neutrino shortage, but researchers had hoped to keep SAGE running until 2002 to look for possible variations in neutrino flow during the 11-year cycle of solar activity.īut in February, officials from the Institute of Rare Metals showed up unannounced at the SAGE site, under orders from the ministry of fuel and power-production industries to confiscate the gallium. SAGE, operating since the mid-1980s, and its Italian rival GALLEX were designed to search for low-energy neutrinos from the sun's primary power source, the fusion of hydrogen into helium. Early detectors only found one third of the predicted neutrinos, casting doubt on either models of the sun's interior or the understanding of neutrinos. Physicists involved in the Soviet-American Gallium Experiment (SAGE), however, have vowed to protect the precious metal at all costs rather than see their neutrino vigil come to an end.īuried in a mine in the north Caucasus mountains, SAGE is one of two solar neutrino detectors built to resolve a major crisis for theorists. The strongly coupled dynamics inside the nucleus have made detailed and precise predictions extraordinarily difficult, particularly in the GeV energy region where pions and other particles can be produced through the excitation of hadronic resonances.ĭetailed and precise measurements of neutrino-nucleus interactions are essential to guide progress.MOSCOW-Cash-strapped government officials are threatening to confiscate 60 tons of valuable gallium from a neutrino observatory in southern Russia.
hydrogen and oxygen in the case of water, argon in the case of a liquid argon time projection chamber). To this end, we need to accurately understand how a neutrino interacts with the nuclei in the detector material (e.g. In order to make enormous neutrino detectors, we have turned to cheap and abundant materials that nonetheless allow us to observe neutrino interactions by detecting the particles which come out of them. While increasingly powerful accelerators with proton beams approaching 1 megawatt of power are being used to produce neutrinos, enormous detectors with tons (for near/short base line detectors ~100 m away from the source) or kilotons (for far detectors ~1000 km from the source) of mass are needed in order to obtain enough observations of neutrino interactions to make precise measurments of neuttrino properties, including neutrino oscillations. One of the defining properties of neutrinos is their extremely feeble interaction with neutrinos.
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