All atoms are made up of subatomic mote . But not every subatomic particle spends its clock time lock into an corpuscle . Some particles , like neutrino , whiz around and through our oblivious body every day , while others are created when humans break matter together at high-pitched stop number . To see these ultra - lilliputian subatomic particle , however , we have to apply enormous machines called particle detectors .
Some of these detectors are coolheaded enough to be harebrained scientist lairs . Some are buried deep in ice , others weigh as much as a hundred jet airplane , while others are cautiously calibrate to search for dour matter . Here are ten of the most awful scientific tools you ’ll ever see .
1 . Super - Kamiokande Experiment
Deep in the Japanese Kamioka mine , 1000 meters below the surface , a vast untainted steel cylinder ride , lined with 13,000 photomultiplier tubes and filled with 50,000 lashings of purified water . Built in 1991 with experiments beginning in 1996,Super - Kamiokandehas been observe neutrino from blank and those generated on Earth for longer than any other neutrino detector currently running . Those photomultiplier tubes serve as light detector , cull up the Cherenkov radiation that is emitted in the rare issue when a neutrino interacts with matter and releases a charged particle .
2 . ANTARES
Why pump water into a army tank when we have oceans of swimming H2O ? TheANTARESexperiment 2.5 kilometers beneath the Mediterranean Sea is a Cherenkov detector like the Super - Kamiokande experiment , but it looks at neutrino interactions with the water in the naturally occurring ocean , and detects the leave Cherenkov brightness level with array of photomultiplier - base optical mental faculty . Although this is one of only two neutrino lookout station now running under raw urine , they wo n’t be the last : the proposedKM3NeTproject in the Mediterranean will shroud several cubic kilometers of water , include thousands of sensing element , and contain the work from other Mediterranean - Sea - based neutrino observatories , namely ANTARES and from the presently - inactive Mediterranean NEMO and NESTOR projects .
3 . Baikal
likewise to ANTARES , the neutrino telescope in Russia’sLake Baikalalso uses array of optical sensor to search for neutrinos . Unlike ANTARES , however , the Baikal detector has a winter camp , when it must be reached by drilling through the ice that form over it . ( This is ostensibly “ a work for existent humankind , ” as noted in a photo record album that also contains theentry , “ Not only neutrino one can angle in Baikal – deep in Pisces , the lake is a land of fisher . ” )
4 . IceCube Neutrino Observatory
TheIceCube Neutrino Observatoryin Antarctica makes the on in Baikal wait wimpish . It also relies on piss - albeit in its self-coloured phase — to ferret outneutrinos from space . But although it uses the same case of veritable regalia employed by ANTARES and Baikal , this array can not just be lowered into the solid ice of the South Pole . First , researchers had to take a live - urine drill to the icing , build shafts 2.5 kilometers deep , and only then could each string of optical module be carefully get down into the void - for a total terms tag of $ 271 million . Another divergence is size : composed to over 5,000 optical module that together take up a volume of about one cubic kilometer , IceCube is much large than ANTARES or the array in Lake Baikal .
5 . Soudan Underground Laboratory ’s CDMS II
Minnesota ’s Soudan Mine is the oldest mine for iron ore in Minnesota - and in addition to iron , it also houses detectors for both neutrino and dismal topic thousands of feet below the surface . The detector were built at this degree to bring down the interference of cosmic ray muons , which can cause too much racket in sensitive demodulator . We screw that dark matter is somehow impart more mass to the universe than the visible matter can account for , but its true nature is unknown . Some researchers , however , have posited that very grievous atom , which neither give out nor absorb Christ Within , could be the beginning of that extra mass . If any of these WIMPS , or weakly interacting massive particles , reached Earth , they would disturb any matter they passed through - and theCDMS IIproject aims to notice that disturbance . The mine also houses the neutrino - detectingMINOSproject .
6 . SLAC ’s Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope
Detectors in the ocean , detectors in the ice , and now , a particle demodulator … in space ! SLAC’sFermi Gamma Ray Space Telescopewas establish in June 2008 to look at in high spirits vigour gamma rays . Although its function is to act as a telescope , its operation isanalogous to that of a particle detector . The cubic telescope hold almost 900,000 silicon strips to detect the Vasco da Gamma rays that provide a different image of the universe .
7 . CERN ’s ATLAS detector
CERN ’s Large Hadron Collider can be used for a salmagundi of experiment , andeach detector focuses on depend for something different . Its most sizeable sensor , ATLAS , is also the heavy general - determination corpuscle sensing element in the human beings . At with a diam of 25 meters and a length of 46 meters , it ’s tiny in comparison with a cubic - km neutrino demodulator - but it does weight 7,000 tons and comprise a whopping 100 million sensing element to examine the LHC ’s proton - proton collisions .
8 . CERN ’s CMS sensor
There ’s too much cathartic go on at the Large Hadron Collider to limit ourselves to only one of their detectors . Besides , ATLAS may have a greater volume , but at 12,500 tons , the LHC’sCompact Muon Solenoid , or CMS , outbalance it . Like ATLAS , CMS attend to as a general - purpose detector . Together , ATLAS and CMS are home to some of the sexiest experiments in physics today , looking for evidence of the Higgs boson , morose matter atom , and even higher proportion . Unlike ATLAS , however , CMS apply a vast solenoid attractor ( a gyre of overseas telegram that creates an electromagnet when current runs through it ) to turn the particle beam , as opposed to ATLAS ’s multi - magnet system .
9 . The Collider Detector at FermiLab ( CDF )
In FermiLab ’s Tevatron collider , beams of protons and antiproton crash into each other , CDFlooks at the resulting slaughter . Although the Tevatron has reckon the top and bottom quark , the W and izzard boson ( which CERN had found first ) , and other fundamental particle , it was most frequently in the news this year for its race to circumvent CERN to thediscovery of the Higgs Boson . 2011 was the Tevatron ’s last chance for new experiments - it ’s being retire this year .
10 . Brookhaven National Lab ’s PHENIX and STAR detectors
At Brookhaven National Lab , theRelativistic Heavy Ion Collider(RHIC ) smashes beams of relatively heavy gold ions together at relativistic speeds . Because the ions are a wad toilsome than the particles that smash together at CERN or FermiLab , they also conduct less energy . But RHIC is n’t aiming to produce in high spirits - energy particles - instead , it focuses on make slew of lower free energy particles and learn their interactions , particularly the quark - gluon plasm that happen shortly when the energy of the collision causes corpuscle to “ melt . ” To get the full picture of the soup , you could use both alive detectors at RHIC : theSTARdetector is the all - purpose perceiver , looking at hadron produced in the particle collision , whilePHENIXsearches for rare and electromagnetic particles . ( Incidentally , CERN’sALICEdetector also looks at the quark gluon soup that results from lowering - ion collisions , but while this is only one of many CERN experiments , it ’s the chief focus of RHIC ’s work .
look-alike viaSuper - Kamiokande , Wikipedia , Baikal Neutrino Telescope , IceCube , Wikipedia , NASA , CERN , CERN , FermiLab , Flickr
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