Russian scientists have deployed a giant telescope into the frigid depths of Lake Baikal in Southern Siberia to search for the smallest known particles in the universe.
The telescope, Baikal-GVD, is designed to search for neutrinos, which are almost massless subatomic particles with no electric charge. Neutrinos are everywhere, but they interact so weakly with the forces around them that they are extremely difficult to detect.
That is why scientists are looking under Lake Baikal, which at a depth of 1700 meters is the deepest lake of SoilNeutrino detectors are usually built underground to protect them from cosmic rays and other sources of interference. Clear fresh water and a thick, protective ice cover make Lake Baikal an ideal place to look for neutrinos, researchers say news service AFP on March 13.
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The scientists placed the neutrino detector through the ice about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) from the lake shore in the southern part of the lake on March 13, taking modules of rope, glass balls and stainless steel up to 4,300 feet (1,310 m) in the water.
The glass spheres contain so-called photomultiplier tubes, which detect a certain kind of light that is emitted when a neutrino passes through a clear medium (in this case lake water) at a faster speed than light passing through that same medium. This light is called Cherenkov light after one of its discoverers, the Soviet physicist Pavel Cherenkov.
Researchers have been searching for neutrinos under Lake Baikal since 2003, but the new telescope is the largest instrument deployed there so far. All told, the strings and modules measure about one-tenth of a cubic mile (or half a cubic kilometer), Dmitry Naumov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research told AFP. According to the scientific consortium that developed the telescope, it will also be used to search for dark matter and other exotic particles.
Baikal-GVD is about half the size of the largest neutrino detector on Earth, the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory, which consists of the same type of light-sensitive modules as Baikal-GVD, embedded in 0.2 cubic miles (1 cubic km) of Antarctic ice. IceCube detects about 275 neutrinos from Earth’s atmosphere every day, according to scientists about the projectThe Russian scientists and their collaborators in the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Slovakia plan to expand Baikal-GVD to the size of IceCube or larger in the coming years.
Originally published on Live Science.