China hopes a giant laboratory 700 meters underground will be the key to beating the US in discovering the secrets of the universe’s most mysterious particles: neutrinos. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), due to be completed next year after more than a decade of construction, is based on a nearly 35-meter-wide spherical machine made of stainless steel and acrylic, designed to help measure incomprehensibly small subatomic units that are almost move. at the speed of light. Despite the universe being covered (100 trillion are believed to pass through your body every second), very little is known about neutrinos and their behavior because they are so difficult to detect.
However, if all goes according to plan, Chinese physicists plan to make history by uncovering information that will lead to solving what is known as the “mass hierarchy” problem. And they want to do it before anyone else.
“[Being] the first means everything, and the second means nothing,” Wang Yifang, JUNO project manager and director of China Institute of High Energy Physics, told the AFP during a factory tour earlier this month.
Experts determined years ago that neutrinos appear to occupy one of three mass states – but their weight, from heaviest to lightest, remains unclear. If researchers can figure it out, the new information could help build a more complete standard model of particle physics and increase our knowledge about the inner workings of planets, stars and supernovae. JUNO’s potential mass hierarchy findings could even force physicists to reconsider established scientific facts, especially when it comes to quantum mechanics.
“If JUNO turns out to show that our understanding is wrong, that would be a revolution,” Patrick Huber, director of the Center for Neutrino Physics at American University Virginia Tech, said on October 17.
[Related: The Milky Way’s ghostly neutrinos have finally been found.]
Once activated, researchers plan to focus JUNO on neutrinos emitted from a pair of nuclear power plants located about 53 miles away on either side of the underground facility. But cracking the mass hierarchy of neutrinos is not as simple as measuring their (immensely small) weights. Experts believe it will take about six years of experimentation and analysis to finally find the answers to the mass hierarchy problem.
During that time, separate, similar projects are expected to get underway at facilities such as the US-led IceCube Observatory at the South Pole, as well as Japan’s Super-Kamiokande Lab. While China seems to be leading the way at the moment of the game compared to their competitionthe unexpected twists in physics research allow anyone to be the first to find the answers to the mass hierarchy, provided you have an extensive working knowledge of some of the universe’s most complex sciences. Access to an underground, giant shiny steel detector sphere is probably a good asset too.
