For the very first time, the SNO+ experiment has demonstrated the capability to detect neutrinos emitted by a nuclear reactor located more than 240 km away using plain water.
The Science
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that exhibit extremely weak interaction with matter. They originate from various types of radioactive decay, such as those occurring within the sun’s core and in nuclear reactors. Furthermore, it’s impossible to block neutrinos; they can effortlessly journey from a nuclear reactor’s core to a distant detector, and even penetrate the Earth itself.
Therefore, to capture the minuscule signals from neutrinos, devices of immense size and high sensitivity are required. The SNO+ experiment recently demonstrated that a detector filled merely with water is capable of detecting reactor neutrinos, despite the fact that the neutrinos create only tiny signals in the detector.
The Impact
The SNO+ measurement shows that distant nuclear reactors can be observed and monitored with something as simple and inexpensive as water. Reactors cannot shield the neutrinos they produce. This means SNO+’s measurement is proof of the idea that such water detectors could play a role in ensuring nuclear non-proliferation.
Like SNO+, such detectors would still need to be very clean of any radioactivity, large (SNO+ contains 1,000 tons of water), and able to detect the tiny amount of light that the neutrinos produce. The use of water, however, means that very large detectors are possible and a real option for “seeing” even very distant reactors.
Summary
Scientists long thought that the tiny signals (just 10-20 photons) created by reactor neutrinos in a water detector would make it impossible to detect those neutrinos, particularly when the detector was far away from the reactor and the rate of these signals was very low.
By ensuring that the detector was clean from even trace amounts of radioactivity, and by having an energy threshold lower than any water detector ever built, SNO+ was able to see these signals and show that they came from nuclear reactors at least 240 kilometers (150 miles) away. The measurement was still quite difficult, as backgrounds (fake events) from residual radioactivity, and from neutrinos created in the atmosphere by cosmic rays, needed to be identified and removed.
Water detectors have several advantages. They are inexpensive and can be very large, making them useful for monitoring reactors across international borders. Improvements to such monitoring, including using water-based liquid scintillators or “loading” the water with gadolinium, both of which would boost the signal size, are being tested by other collaborations.
Reference: “Evidence of Antineutrinos from Distant Reactors Using Pure Water at SNO+” by A. Allega et al. (The SNO+Collaboration), 1 March 2023, Physical Review Letters.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.091801
This work is from the SNO+ Collaboration, an international collaboration of roughly 100 scientists from the United States (the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California at Davis, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Boston University, and the University of Chicago), Canada, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Germany, China, and Mexico. SNO+ is located in SNOLAB, the Canadian underground laboratory.
SNO+ is funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics and has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration through the Nuclear Science and Security program. Funding in Canada comes from Canada Foundation for Innovation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canada Institute for Advanced Research, Queens University, the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science, the Alberta Science and Research Investments Program, the Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario, and the Ontario Early Researcher Awards. In the United Kingdom, funding has come from the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under the European Research Council grant agreement, and the Marie Curie grant agreement. Funding has also come from the Fundaçáo para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT-Portugal), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaf in Germany, DGAPA-UNAM and Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología in Mexico, and Discipline Construction Fund of Shandong University in China.
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2 Comments
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I assume that the vessel is shaped like a sphere. Fantastic Image to display the neutrino paths I tend to invisen a 3D image with the light direction of view, as the neutrinos pass each side of the vessel, from the blurred focus points to the distinct points forming a sphere, the straighter the long line is the more of a right angel to the two dimensional view. a couple of patterns appear a north and south hemisphere. and the lines have a formation that if the light were to move its lines would pull back to a direction that the neutrino is moving to a representation as a dot point if the light turned the line would reappear in the opposite direction. the longer lines the more right angle line you have, the line has a look of crossing the interior, a passage path across threw to the other fare surface of the vessel. My view also looks like there is a catalyst for the viewable state besides the light, Maybe the charged particles of water are sharing some charge as the neutrino passes.