What is the issue?
People from several walk of life fear about the proposed Indian Neutrino Observatory project in Tamil Nadu due to lack of awareness.
What are neutrinos?
- The only particle other than gravitational waves that can zip through the universe at speeds very close to that of light are called neutrinos.
- The biggest nuclear reactor that most life on earth derives energy from is the sun.
- Like all nuclear reactors, in addition to giving out energy (heat and light), the sun also emits neutrinos.
What is Standard Model?
- All the laws and forces of nature that we know of, other than gravitation, are described by what physicists call the Standard Model.
- It predicted that neutrinos, which come under three types or flavours — tau-neutrino, electron-neutrino and muon-neutrino — would not oscillate from one flavour to another.
- The discovery that they do meant that the Standard Model or the basic laws of physics had to be further modified.
- Thus, through the neutrino detectors we are actually observing the fundamental laws of physics at the cutting edge.
What INO will do?
- The proposed India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) aims to observe muon neutrinos that are continuously produced in the atmosphere when cosmic rays strike the earth.
- Since every type of matter particle has an anti-matter partner particle associated with it, there are also anti-neutrinos that the INO can observe.
- Anti-neutrinos also come in three flavours and can oscillate from one to the other.
- The INO, by observing the rates at which neutrinos and anti-neutrinos oscillate, will make a substantial contribution to the quest to unravel the secrets of the ultimate laws of physics.
Is there anything to fear?
- There are some baseless allegations that the INO, which is just like a telescope, causes radioactivity and have compared it with the dangers of having a nuclear power plant or radioactive material in the neighbourhood.
- This cannot be true since the neutrinos are very feeble and weakly interacting particles that we can’t even see or feel without the help of an observatory.
- Beams of neutrinos are being sent to the NOvA neutrino detector in the U.S. and to the T2K neutrino detector in Japan every day.
- Moreover, being the lightest matter particles, the neutrinos do not decay into any other particles, as everything else is heavier.
- So they are not like uranium which decays radioactively into smaller atoms.
- All the INO would do is to provide the lens to observe neutrinos as they are too feeble or faint to be detected by the naked eye.
Source: The Hindu
