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from the deep-in-the-hart-of-mount-doom dept.
India is joining the world of exotic particle research, announcing US$235 million worth of funding for a neutrino observatory in the country's south.
Approval for the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), proposed in 2013, means construction of the underground complex can now begin.
The 1,300 metre deep cavern under the village of Pottipuram will be home to a 50,000 tonne iron calorimeter (ICAL) acting as the detector. The ICAL is to be made of 30,000 resistive plate chambers separated by iron plates.
Physics World reports ( http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/jan/07/indian-neutrino-observatory-set-for-construction ) that the INO will look for evidence of the neutrino mass hierarchy, trying to work out which of the three known neutrino mass states is the heaviest and which is the lightest.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/11/india_to_launch_neutrino_hunter/
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Wednesday January 14 2015, @03:28PM
Neutrinos are somewhat new on the particle zoo, as far as I know. Interactions of the postulated tau-neutrino for example was only observed in 2000 [wikipedia.org]
Physics World reports that the INO will look for evidence of the neutrino mass hierarchy, trying to work out which of the three known neutrino mass states is the heaviest and which is the lightest.
This is on the wiki list of unsolved problems in physics [wikipedia.org]:
Neutrino mass [wikipedia.org]
What is the mass of neutrinos, whether they follow Dirac [wikipedia.org] or Majorana [wikipedia.org] statistics? Is mass hierarchy normal or inverted? Is the CP violating phase 0?
While I have no idea what this does mean, I wholeheartedly wish you good look, INO scientists.