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Article: Blasting Neutrinos Under Wisconsin May Yield Big Payoff
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- August 17, 2009
- Author:
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Scientists are playing an exotic game of pitch and catch between
Illinois and Minnesota. Their catcher's mitt is solid iron, weighs
5,500 tons, and is parked in northern Minnesota in an abandoned iron
mine. With millions of dollars from the federal stimulus package,
construction crews are now building a second mitt near the Canadian
border. It's even heavier, some 15,000 tons, and is made of 385,000
liquid-filled cells of PVC plastic.
Five hundred miles to the south is the pitcher: Fermilab, a
sprawling U.S. government laboratory west of Chicago where
physicists do violent things with tiny particles.
The objects in flight are very strange particles called
neutrinos. Fermilab scientists have ...