Russian scientists have built a giant telescope in the icy depths of Lake Baikal in southern Siberia to search for the smallest particles in the universe.
The telescope, Baikal-GVD, is designed to search neutrinos, which are almost massless subatomic particles, without electric charge. Neutrinos are everywhere, but they communicate so poorly with the forces around them that it is very difficult to detect.
That is why scientists are looking under Lake Baikal, which is 1,700 meters deep and the deepest lake. Earth. Neutrino detectors are usually built underground to protect them from cosmic rays and other sources of interference. Clear fresh water and thick, protective ice cover make Lake Baikal an ideal place to look for neutrinos, researchers said AFP news service on March 13th.
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The scientists deployed the neutrino detector through the ice on March 13, about 4 kilometers from the shore in the southern part of the lake, and made modules of rope, glass spheres and stainless steel up to 1,310 meters the water.
The glass spheres contain photomultiplier tubes that detect a specific type of light that is emitted when a neutrino moves through a clear medium (in this case lake water) at a faster velocity than light passing through the same medium. This light is called Cherenkov light after one of its discoverers, the Soviet physicist Pavel Cherenkov.
Researchers have been searching for neutrinos under Lake Baikal since 2003, but the new telescope is the largest instrument deployed there so far. Even though the strings and modules are about one-tenth of a cubic mile (or half a cubic kilometer), Dmitry Naumov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research told AFP. According to the scientific consortium that developed the telescope, it will also be used to search for dark matter and other exotic particles.
Baikal GVD is about half the size of the largest neutrino detector on earth, the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory, which consists of the same kind of light observation modules as Baikal-GVD, embedded in 0.2 cubic miles (1 cubic kilometer) of Antarctic ice. IceCube detects about 275 neutrinos from the Earth’s atmosphere every day, according to scientists about the project. The Russian scientists and their collaborators in the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Slovakia plan to expand Baikal-GVD to the size of IceCube or larger in the coming years.
Originally published on Live Science.