寻找中微子卫报
In arch of the neutrino, ghost particle of the univer
The main spectrometer of Katrin on its way to Karlsruhe in 2006. The project is t to get under way in June 2018 Photograph: Michael Latz
情人节送花On the outskirts of Karlsruhe, in south-west Germany, engineers have buried a giant, stainl
ess steel device, bigger than a blue whale, inside the town’s institute of technology. The machine looks for all the world like a grounded zeppelin or a buried blimp.
德国西南部的卡尔斯鲁厄郊区,工程师在该镇技术研究所中埋了一个比蓝鲸还大的巨型不锈钢设备,该设备像搁浅的齐柏林飞艇,后一个被埋藏起来的飞艇。
In fact, the apparatus is one of the world’s biggest vacuum chambers. Air pressure inside it is lower than that on the surface of the moon and it has been installed to help solve a single, intricate problem: finding the mass of the univer’s most insignificant entity, the neutrino.
事实上,该仪器是世上最大的真空室之一,里面的气压比月球表面还低,它已被用来解决一个单一且复杂的问题:获取宇宙中最微不足道的实体中微子的质量。
Every cond, billions of neutrinos pass through our bodies. The sun nds trillions streaming across space every minute. Uncountable numbers have been left over from the Big Bang birth of the cosmos 13.8 billion years ago.
每秒钟,数十亿个中微子穿过我们的身体,而太阳每分钟要向太空中发射数以万亿计的中微子。138亿年前宇宙大爆炸遗留了不计其数的中微子数据。
In fact, there are more neutrinos in the univer than any other type of particle of matter, though hardly anything can stop the cosmological lightweights in their paths. And this inability to interact with other matter has made them a source of considerable frustration for scientists who believe neutrinos could bring new understandings to major cosmological problems, including the nature of dark matter and the fate of our expanding univer. Unfortunately, the unbearable lightness of their being makes them very difficult to study.
事实上,宇宙中的中微子要比任何其他类型的物质粒子都多,尽管没有什么东西能在阻止这些宇宙里的小家伙前进。不与其他物质发生反应使中微子成为科学家恼火的原因,他们相信中微子能为暗物质的属性和膨胀宇宙的归宿等重要的宇宙问题提供新的理解。不幸的是,它的不能承受之轻让人很难研究。
Hence the decision to build the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment, or Katrin. It is desi
gned to measure the behaviour of neutrinos and electrons that are emitted by the hydrogen isotope, tritium, in order to uncover slight variations in their paths as they fly through the experiment’s vacuum chamber. The variations should reveal preci details about the neutrino’s physical properties, in particular its mass.
动漫人物女生可爱然后决定建立卡尔斯鲁厄氚中微子实验室或简称为卡特琳,该实验室旨在测量氢同位素氚发出的中微子和电子的行为,以发现它们穿过实验真空室时的轻微路径变化。这些变化可以揭示中微子物理属性的精确细节,特别是其质量。
“We have pushed technology to the limit in building Katrin,” says the project’s leader, Guido Drexlin. “Apart from creating a near perfect vacuum inside its huge chamber, we also have to keep the temperature of the tritium, which is the machine’s source of neutrinos, inside the device to a constant 30C above absolute zero. We have also had to take incredible care about the magnetic fields inside the machines. Esntially, we have had to demagneti the whole building.”
该项目负责人吉多·德雷克斯林说:“为了建设卡特琳,我们将技术发挥到极限。除了在巨
大的室内空间制造一个接近完美的真空,还必须将装置内氚的温度恒定在绝对零度以上30℃,氚是装置内中微子的来源。我们还得密切关注设备内的磁场,最重要的是,我们得为整个建筑消磁。”
It has taken more than a decade of planning and construction to put Katrin together. Its price tag, just over €60m, has been met by the German taxpayer via the country’s state-funded Helmholtz Association, with a further €6m chipped in by US, Russian, Czech and Spanish scientists who will have a minor involvement with the project.
卡特琳历经数十年规划与建设,耗资超过六千万欧元,由德国纳税人通过国有赫姆霍兹联合会出资,美国、俄罗斯、捷克以及西班牙科学家共同出资六百万欧元,他们或多或少将参与项目建设。
Final trials are now being completed and full operations are t to begin in June, though it will take a further five years of gathering data before scientists can expect to have enough information to make an accurate asssment of the neutrino’s mass.
最终测试已近完成,预计六月开始全面运行,虽然还要再花五年时间收集数据,科学家才能有足够信息对中微子质量进行精确评估。土豆焖牛腩
“Even then, we may have to go to a cond pha of operations to get our answer,” says Drexlin. “We are moving into unknown territory here.”日记五百字
德雷克斯林说道:“即使到了那时,我们也许还得进行第二阶段的测试以获取答案,我们将进入一个未知的领域。”
The neutrino was first postulated in 1930, by the Nobel physics laureate Wolfgang Pauli, to explain the behaviour of other subatomic particles during radioactive decay. It took a further 26 years of arch before neutrinos were first pinpointed in detectors and they remain maddeningly elusive.端午节英语
1930年,诺贝尔物理学奖得主沃尔夫冈·泡利假定中微子存在以解释放射性衰变过程中其它亚原子粒子的行为。探测器首次捕捉到中微子之前,他又进行了26年的研究,然而中微子依然难以捉摸。
醋酸钠化学式
枢密使是什么官An illustration of their insubstantial nature is provided by Canada’s Sudbury Neutrino Obrvatory, where a 1,000-tonne tank of heavy water is ud to stop some of the 10 million million neutrinos that pass through it each cond. Of the, only about 30 are actually detected in an average day.
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