GHOSTS AT A QUANTUM LEVEL

Wait. Ghosts at a quantum level?!!. Yes, thats correct. We're going to talk about the so called 'Ghost particles'- Neutrino.

What exactly are Neutrinos?

You must be familiar with particles like protons and electrons.( If you dont know what they are ..... protons are particles with a positive charge and electrons are particles with a negative charge ). What about a particle with no charge? .... that's a neutrino. Don't confuse neutrinos with neutrons.

Neutrinos are fundamental particles which means that they do not comprise of any other particle. These particles have a negligible mass. Although they're known to interact with matter, they are electrically neutral and are far from easy to detect.

How were Neutrinos discovered?

Neutrinos were first predicted by Wolfgang Pauli and were discovered by Fred Reines

(for which he received the nobel prize in 1995). So, how did he discover something that's almost undetectable? If you are having a hard time thinking why neutrinos are so hard to find, imagine neutrinos to be a drop of nature's mysterious ghosts passing easily through a pin hole. So basically, everything is like 'empty space' for these wonder particles. To make things easy for you, Fred Reines knew that when neutrinos react with Chlorine, they give Argon. He took a huge vat of perchloroethylene and had to find 10 Argon atoms created every week. This sounds too easy , but its not. What he actually found was 3 atoms of Argon per week. So, the actual value does not match with the predicted value. This is known as the solar neutrino defect.

The above image shows the Super - Kamiokande in Japan which is one of the mighty neutrino detectors on Earth. There are other detectors too like the Baikal Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope, ANTARES, etc.

Where can you find a neutrino in the universe?

The very first place where you can find a neutrino is YOU! Every second there might be a hundred billion neutrinos passing through your veins or any other part of your body. So as you are reading this, there are already a hundred billion neutrinos passing through you. These particles are also continuously produced in one of the massive nuclear reactors we know - THE SUN. Cosmic Rays serve as a source for neutrinos too!

Now that you have read this, can you count how many neutrinos have been a part of you?

~ THE ORPHIC ASTROPHILE