{"id":442076,"date":"2025-12-12T09:25:17","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T09:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/442076\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T09:25:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T09:25:17","slug":"elusive-neutrinos-transform-carbon-into-nitrogen-in-never-before-seen-interaction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/442076\/","title":{"rendered":"Elusive Neutrinos Transform Carbon Into Nitrogen in Never-Before-Seen Interaction"},"content":{"rendered":"

The mysterious \u201cghost particles\u201d known as neutrinos<\/a> have been observed interacting<\/a> with matter in a new way, despite the typical rarity and weakness of their interactions with other particles<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Neutrinos<\/a> are so elusive<\/a> to observers that trillions pass ethereally through our bodies every second without our noticing. Yet researchers at the University of Oxford have reported the striking new detection<\/a>, first described in a recent paper published in Physical Review Letters.<\/p>\n

Neutrino Research<\/p>\n

Neutrinos are byproducts of nuclear reactions; the Sun produces a tremendous number of them, which then travel to Earth. Despite their ubiquity, the particles interact with only a small number of targets, making their detection extremely challenging.<\/p>\n

In the new research, the Oxford team captured them converting carbon into nitrogen in the controlled environment of an underground detector. The Oxford teams utilized the Sudbury, Canada SNOLAB, and its SNO+ detector in their work, located two kilometers underground within an operational mine.<\/p>\n

SNO+ is an outgrowth of the original SNO experiment, which studied neutrinos as they journeyed from the Sun to the Earth, resulting in the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for lead investigator Arthur B. McDonald. Because neutrinos have extremely faint signatures, a location deep underground is necessary for their study, where large volumes of dirt and rock shield the lab from cosmic rays and background radiation that could otherwise contaminate the work.<\/p>\n

Capturing the Interaction<\/p>\n

The recent discovery was not accidental: a high-energy neutrino transforming a carbon-13 nucleus into nitrogen-13 about 10 minutes after contact is precisely what the team had been seeking, employing a method known as delayed coincidence.<\/p>\n

In such an observation, researchers first look for a flash produced by the neutrino interacting with the carbon-13 nucleus, and then a second flash as radioactive decay converts the nucleus into nitrogen-13. Such a specific pattern enables scientists to confidently identify neutrino interactions, which can be challenging to discern from background noise.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis discovery uses the natural abundance of carbon-13 within the experiment\u2019s liquid scintillator to measure a specific, rare interaction,\u201d said SNOLAB staff scientist Dr Christine Kraus<\/a>. \u201cTo our knowledge, these results represent the lowest energy observation of neutrino interactions on carbon-13 nuclei to date and provides the first direct cross-section measurement for this specific nuclear reaction to the ground state of the resulting nitrogen-13 nucleus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Experiments at SNOLAB were conducted for 231 days, between May 4, 2022, and June 29, 2023. Going into the project, they estimated that they would observe 4.7 events and ended up with a very close figure of 5.6 events.<\/p>\n

Further Explorations<\/p>\n

\u201cCapturing this interaction is an extraordinary achievement,\u201d said lead author Gulliver Milton, a PhD student at the University of Oxford\u2019s Department of Physics. \u201cDespite the rarity of the carbon isotope, we were able to observe its interaction with neutrinos, which were born in the Sun\u2019s core and travelled vast distances to reach our detector.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\"Baltic\t\t\t<\/a>
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Because of their ghostly nature, neutrinos are essential to advancing physics, and this research is a significant step toward their effective study. Continuing to press ahead will allow for improved understanding of mysterious physical processes such as nuclear fusion and the evolution of the universe.<\/p>\n

\u201cSolar neutrinos themselves have been an intriguing subject of study for many years, and the measurements of these by our predecessor experiment, SNO, led to the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics,\u201d explained co-author Professor Steven Biller, of the University of Oxford Department of Physics.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is remarkable that our understanding of neutrinos from the Sun has advanced so much,\u201d he added, \u201cthat we can now use them for the first time as a \u2018test beam\u2019 to study other kinds of rare atomic reactions!\u201d<\/p>\n

The paper, \u201cFirst Evidence of Solar Neutrino Interactions on 13C<\/a>,\u201d appeared in Physical Review Letters on December 10, 2025.<\/p>\n

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at\u00a0<\/b>ryan@thedebrief.org<\/b><\/a>, and follow him on Twitter <\/b>@mdntwvlf<\/b><\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The mysterious \u201cghost particles\u201d known as neutrinos have been observed interacting with matter in a new way, despite…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":442077,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[98559,203839,492,159,203840,67,132,90224,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-442076","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-neutrino","9":"tag-neutrino-detection","10":"tag-physics","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-snolab","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-university-of-oxford","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115705881182555397","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}