For anyone wondering about the title, by "trap" they mean "detect destructively": there are no stable neutrinos in a bottle in this article.
That would be a wild thing to accomplish, given that neutrinos are created at relativistic speeds, have virtually zero mass, and don’t react with anything but gravity and the weak force.<p>Whatever gravity “trap” you make is going to pale in comparison to the gravity wells around us (earth, the sun, etc) and the weak force scales exponentially with energy. So a slow-moving neutrino would interact even less with the weak force than a relativistic one.
Damn it. Heart rate sky-rocketed from excitement.
Wonderful pictures!<p>The Super Kamiokande had a terrible engineering event where the delicate sensor bulbs shattered, and the pressure delta from one shattering caused neighbors to shatter, in a chain reaction that destroyed large amounts of sensors.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoBFjD5tn_E" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoBFjD5tn_E</a><p>Unrelated:<p>>Neutrinos come in three different “flavors” (electron, muon, and tau) and can oscillate, or switch, between them. To do so, neutrinos must have mass<p>Why? What actually is "Neutrino oscillation" and why does it <i>require</i> the neutrino have mass? My already feeble understanding of particle and quantum physics always breaks down at these sorts of points.<p>How are we sure that the neutrino is in fact a single particle that should use the same sort of mathematical machinery as all others? Am I even asking a question that means something? I know literally every physicist ever graduated has spent time thinking everything in physics is wrong and tried poking at such ideas, so I guess I'm more interested in what those kids end up finding that brings them back to "No this makes more sense" of neutrinos in the standard model.
There is a good exhibit on this at the Miraikan in Odaiba, Tokyo. Detecting things and proving we detected what we detected we previously couldn't is always a fascinating exercise, especially whilst so much matter is still unrecognised.
HN automangled the title, should have a “how” at the beginning. The change makes the headline sound like this is news, but it’s just a description of neutrino detectors.