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Frigatebird [soylentnews.org] writes:

LHC has not ended the Earth by producing micro-black holes, but now it may have done the next best thing.
Story at New Atlas [newatlas.com] Old Atlas, you know, used to hold up the sky, appropriately enough.

Physicists have detected “ghost particles” in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time. An experiment called FASER picked up telltale signals of neutrinos being produced in particle collisions, which can help scientists better understand key physics.

Neutrinos are elementary particles that are electrically neutral, extremely light and rarely interact with particles of matter. That makes them tricky to detect, even though they’re very common – in fact, there are billions of neutrinos streaming through your body right now. Because of this, they’re often described as ghost particles.

Neutrinos are produced in stars, supernovae, quasars. radioactive decay and from cosmic rays interacting with atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s long been thought that particle accelerators like the LHC should be making them too, but without the right instruments they would just zip away undetected.

And now that “right instrument” has been installed and tested. During a pilot run of an experiment called FASER, installed in 2018, scientists picked up six neutrino interactions.

“Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider,” says Jonathan Feng, co-author of a study describing the results. “This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the universe.”

Paper, or at least an abstract, available at This Place [aps.org].

Original Submission