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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byAnonymous Coward writes:
What will it be in joules, 1 peta electronVolt?
Could I boil a kettle on this neutrino (potentially)?
byclick2005 ( 921437 ) * writes:
FTA:
Out of the countless detections it’s seen, two of them—nicknamed, seriously, Bert and Ernie—were phenomenally, unbelievably energetic: Each had an energy over one thousand trillion times the energy of a visible light photon. That’s huge, far larger energies than even the Large Hadron Collider can create. It’s very roughly equivalent to the energy of a raindrop hitting you on the head which may not sound like much, but remember we’re taking about a single subatomic par
bydimeglio ( 456244 ) writes:
Interesting. So if one of these neutrinos hits me, will I feel it? I understand due to electroweak unification (of these very high energy neutrinos) it will cause interaction with our body.
byspectrokid ( 660550 ) writes:
The neutrino is going to go straight through you with a 99.99999% probability. But if it does stop inside your body and deliver its energy, it should give of one hell of a whack. Wonder if you would be able to feel that?
byRoger W Moore ( 538166 ) writes:
The neutrino is going to go straight through you with a 99.99999% probability.
Actually that is probably not quite true. For the vast majority of neutrinos you encounter on a daily basis (from radioactive decay, relic Big Bang neutrinos, solar etc.) you are completely correct. Indeed for these, as the article states, they will pass through the earth without blinking.
However PeV neutrinos are NOT your everyday neutrino. These guys have such an incredible energy (over 100 times the proton energy in the LHC) that the earth is actually opaque to them. In fact if you look at the IceCub
byAnonymous Coward writes:
Why does the neutrino cross-section vary with its energy? Is there a web reference you would recommend I peruse to learn more? Thanks.
byRoger W Moore ( 538166 ) writes:
I tried to explain it without maths in the post above - the more energy you have the easier it is to make a W or Z boson which is how the neutrino interacts with matter. Think of it like a the neutrino being trapped in a valley and in order to interact it has to get over the valley sides. Fortunately it can tunnel so it does not have to clear the peak but the more energy it has, the higher up the valley side it can get and the easier it is to tunnel through. If it does have enough energy to clear the peak then no tunnelling is required and interactions become very easy.
For a fully detailed, mathematical explanation as to why you need to be able to do simple Feynman diagram calculations. I don't know of a webpage with this on it but Griffiths has an excellent book "Introduction to Elementary Particle Physics" aimed at the senior physics undergrad level and Perkins has a similar one which is slightly lower level.
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