SMU physicist Thomas Coan talked with KERA about the neutrino, an elusive fundamental particle that scientists are working to understand using one of the most powerful physics experiments in the world.
Neutrinos are the subject of the NOvA experiment, with the goal to better understand the origins of matter and the inner workings of the universe.
One of the largest and most powerful neutrino experiments in the world, NOvA is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
At the heart of NOvA are its two particle detectors — gigantic machines of plastic and electronic arrays. One detector is at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago and the other is at Ash River, Minn. near the Canadian border.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Dr. Thomas E. Coan in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
Designed and engineered by about a hundred U.S. and international scientists, NOvA is managed by Fermilab. NOvA’s detectors and its particle accelerator officially start up the end of October 2014.
Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, is a member of the NOvA experiment. He is co-convener of NOvA’s calibration and alignment group, guiding a crew of international scientists who handle responsibility for understanding the response of NOvA’s detector when it is struck by neutrinos.
Neutrinos are invisible fundamental particles that are so abundant they constantly bombard us and pass through us at a rate of more than 100,000 billion particles a second. Because they rarely interact with matter, they have eluded scientific observation.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Elusive particle that is one of the building blocks of matter holds the key to space, time, matter, energy and origins of the universe
When scientists pour 3.0 million gallons of mineral oil into what are essentially 350,000 giant plastic tubes, the possibility of a leak can’t be overlooked, says SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan.
The oil and tubes are part of the integral structure of the world’s newest experiment to understand neutrinos — invisible fundamental particles that are so abundant they constantly bombard us and pass through us at a rate of more than 100,000 billion particles a second.
Neutrinos rarely interact with matter and so mostly pass through objects completely unnoticed. The purpose of NOvA, as the new experiment is called, is to better understand neutrinos. That knowledge may lead to a clearer picture of the origins of matter and the inner workings of the universe, Coan said.
”Neutrinos are thought to play a key but still somewhat murky role in explaining how the universe evolved to contain just the matter we see today and somehow disposing of the antimatter present at the Big Bang,” he said.
A massive pivoting machine moves one block of the NOvA far detector across the hall in Ash River, Minn., to connect it with the rest of the detector. Each block measures 50 feet by 50 feet by 6 feet, and was assembled from PVC modules. (Credit: Fermilab)
Coan is an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics and a member of the NOvA experiment. “Solving this riddle is likely to require many experiments to get the story correct,” he said. “NOvA is a next step along what is likely to be a twisty path.”
At the heart of NOvA are its two particle detectors — gigantic machines of plastic and electronic arrays, one at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago and the other in Ash River, Minn. near the Canadian border.
Designed and engineered by about a hundred U.S. and international scientists, NOvA is managed by Fermilab. NOvA’s detectors and its particle accelerator officially start up the end of October.
“There are essentially zero leaks,” Coan said. “This was a bit of a surprise. It guarantees that critical electronics won’t be damaged by leaking oil and that the detector will be highly efficient for detecting the neutrinos we aim at it.”
One of the largest and most powerful neutrino experiments in the world, NOvA is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
SMU graduate student Biao Wang is 300 feet underground in front of the NOvA close detector. Under the direction of SMU physicist Thomas Coan, Wang works on the maintenance and trouble shooting of the detector as an on-call expert for the cooling system of the read-out electronics.
It has the world’s most powerful beam of neutrinos, is the most powerful accelerator neutrino experiment ever built in the United States, and is the longest distance neutrino experiment in the world.
Coan, a co-convener of NOvA’s calibration and alignment group, guides a crew of international scientists who handle responsibility for understanding the response of NOvA’s detector when it is struck by neutrinos.
“The detector has been behaving extremely well,” Coan said, noting NOvA scientists were delighted by the machine’s successful performance during testing after five years of construction.
Neutrino beam will travel near speed of light
Central to the detector are its rectangular plastic tubes staggered in horizontal and vertical layers. As neutrinos strike the oil-filled plastic tubes, the interaction makes the oil — liquid scintillator — faintly glow and creates various particles.
Special green fiberoptic cables in the plastic tubes transmit the faint glow from the liquid scintillator to photosensors at one end of each tube, where the light is converted to bursts of electricity which in turn are sent to nearby computers.
When a neutrino strikes an atom in the liquid scintillator filling the 15-kiloton far detector, it releases a burst of charged particles. Scientists can detect these particles and use them to learn about neutrino interactions.
“We don’t actually see the neutrinos,” Coan said. “We see the particles that are the after-party — the final state particles produced by the neutrinos after they strike the detector.”
SMU’s supercomputer ManeFrame will have a high-profile role with NOvA. SMU will contribute four million processing hours each year to the experiment, Coan said.
The process begins when NOvA’s underground accelerator near Chicago shoots a beam of neutrinos at nearly the speed of light to the particle detectors. Plans call for the accelerator to run for six years or more, stopping only occasionally for maintenance breaks.
“This is a long process,” Coan said. “That is uncommon in our modern culture where we tend to expect quick results. But it will take time for us to capture enough data to do all the science we want to do. It will take years. In a couple weeks Fermilab will start bringing the beam back — which is a more complicated process than just pushing a few buttons and starting it up.”
Scientists hope to discover the properties of neutrinos
NOvA’s purpose is to capture a significant volume of data to allow scientists to draw conclusions about the properties of neutrinos.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Dr. Thomas E. Coan in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
Those properties may hold answers to the nature of matter, energy, space and time, and lead to understanding the origins of the universe.
Specifically, Coan said, NOvA physicists want to know how different types of neutrinos morph from one kind to another, the probability for that to occur, the relative weight of neutrinos, and the difference in behavior between neutrinos and anti-neutrinos.
NOvA’s particle detectors were both constructed within the neutrino beam sent from Fermilab in Batavia, Ill. to northern Minnesota. The 300-ton near detector observes the neutrinos as they embark on their journey through the earth, with no tunnel needed. The 14,000-ton far detector spots those neutrinos after their 500-mile trip, and allows scientists to analyze how they change over that long distance.
Construction on NOvA’s two massive neutrino detectors began in 2009. The Department of Energy in September said construction of the experiment was completed on schedule and under budget.
Scientists predict detectors will catch only a few neutrinos a day
For the next six years, Fermilab will send tens-of thousands of billions of neutrinos every second in a beam aimed at both detectors, and scientists expect to catch only a few each day in the far detector.
From this data, scientists hope to learn more about how and why neutrinos change between one type and another. The three types, called flavors, are the muon, electron and tau neutrino. Over longer distances, neutrinos can flip between these flavors.
NOvA is specifically designed to study muon neutrinos changing into electron neutrinos. Unraveling this mystery may help scientists understand why the universe is composed of matter, and why that matter was not annihilated by antimatter after the Big Bang.
Scientists also will probe the still-unknown masses of the three types of neutrinos in an attempt to determine which is the heaviest.
“Neutrino research is an important part of the worldwide particle physics program,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer.
First results expected in 2015
The far detector in Minnesota is believed to be the largest free-standing plastic structure in the world, at 200 feet long, 50 feet high and 50 feet wide. Both detectors are constructed from PVC, and filled with the scintillating liquid that gives off light. The data acquisition system creates 3-D pictures of the interactions for scientists to analyze.
The NOvA far detector in Ash River saw its first long-distance neutrinos in November 2013.
“Building the NOvA detectors was a wide-ranging effort that involved hundreds of people in several countries,” said Gary Feldman, co-spokesperson of the NOvA experiment.
The NOvA collaboration comprises 208 scientists from 38 institutions in the United States, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.
NOvA stands for NuMI Off-Axis Electron Neutrino Appearance. NuMI is itself an acronym, standing for Neutrinos from the Main Injector, Fermilab’s flagship accelerator. — Margaret Allen, SMU; Fermilab
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Their five stars will be known by 16-digit serial numbers. Dominik would have rather immortalized his four dogs.
Lake Highlands High School students Dominik Fritz (right) and Jason Barton collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness. (Credit: KERA)
Reporter Courtney Collins with the news team at public radio station KERA covered the discovery of five stars made by two Dallas high school students as members of an SMU summer physics research program. Called Quarknet, the program enabled the students to analyze data gleaned from a high-powered telescope in the New Mexico desert.
All five stars are eclipsing contact binary stars, pairs of stars that orbit around each other so closely that their outer atmospheres touch. As the stars eclipse, they dim and then brighten as one emerges from behind the other. These stars are categorized as variable stars, stars that change brightness, which make up half the stars in the universe.
Lake Highlands High School seniors Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are the first high school researchers at SMU to discover new stars.
Fritz and Barton are among nine high school students and two high school physics teachers who conducted physics research at SMU through the QuarkNet program.
By Courtney Collins
KERA News
To most teenagers, star-gazing is the stuff of first dates.
For two seniors at Lake Highlands High School in Dallas, star-gazing over the summer led to five unusual discoveries.
In some respects, Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are typical high-schoolers. Jason’s haircut would make a pop star envious and Dominik’s snazzy specs are effortlessly cool.
When these two kids start to talk science, you realize quickly, they’re two in a million.
“I’m personally fascinated by nuclear reactions and that’s basically what happens in stars, it’s full of nuclear reactions, nuclear fusion, a little bit of fission,” Dominik says.
That set of interests made Dominik a perfect candidate for a summer physics program at SMU. Jason and two other Richardson school district students joined him.
While analyzing data from a high-powered telescope, Jason noticed a few stars that weren’t already in the database.
“I started looking over several nights and seeing if they were actual variable stars and if they did change in brightness over time, and then I combined them all and then I eventually submitted it,” Jason says.
In fact, both teens made submission to an international star index that were accepted. Between them, they’d discovered five eclipsing binary contact stars. Dominik translates:
“Two very, very large star systems that are so close that they actually share their atmospheres.”
Lake Highlands physics teacher Ken Taylor says not many kids make it to upper level physics. That’s why he was so keen to get these students out of the textbook and into real research.
“It was beautiful for me to see my students who were going and forging ahead and taking things that they had learned and going into new territory and seeing the looks on their faces when they began to go somewhere where, in a sense, no one had gone before.”
Two high school students collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness.
Lake Highlands High School students Dominik Fritz (left) and Jason Barton collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness. (Credit: DMN)
Reporter Alexis Espinosa with the Dallas Morning News covered the discovery of five stars made by two Dallas high school students as members of an SMU summer physics research program. Called Quarknet, the program enabled the students to analyze data gleaned from a high-powered telescope in the New Mexico desert.
All five stars are eclipsing contact binary stars, pairs of stars that orbit around each other so closely that their outer atmospheres touch. As the stars eclipse, they dim and then brighten as one emerges from behind the other. These stars are categorized as variable stars, stars that change brightness, which make up half the stars in the universe.
Lake Highlands High School seniors Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are the first high school researchers at SMU to discover new stars.
Fritz and Barton are among nine high school students and two high school physics teachers who conducted physics research at SMU through the QuarkNet program.
By Alexis Espinosa
Dallas Morning News
Dominik Fritz sat in a Southern Methodist University science lab sifting through data. He hoped to discover a star by searching through months of information collected from a telescope in the New Mexico desert 14 years ago.
And then he found it.
He found a star whose variation had not yet been defined. And he would be the one to define it.
He collected data until he had everything he needed to define it as a variable — a star that changes brightness. A day after he submitted the star to the American Association of Variable Star Observers, the organization requested a few minor corrections.
And then, his star was accepted.
“I was so, so happy. My name is out there. I felt like I really accomplished something,” Fritz said. “I can literally tell people … ‘I found a star.’”
Fritz and a classmate, Jason Barton, both discovered stars this summer as part of the SMU’s QuarkNet program.
QuarkNet is a physics teacher development program funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy in universities and laboratories across the country. SMU’s QuarkNet program, which began in 2000, also provides research opportunities to high school students like Fritz and Barton, who are seniors at Lake Highlands High School in Richardson ISD.
Treasures of the night sky: Pairs of stars orbit around each other so closely their outer atmospheres touch, so they dim and brighten.
Artist’s impression of an eclipsing binary star system. The stars pass in front of one another and their combined brightness decreases. (Credit: European Southern Observatory)
Two Dallas high school students discovered five stars as members of an SMU summer physics research program that enabled them to analyze data gleaned from a high-powered telescope in the New Mexico desert.
All five stars are eclipsing contact binary stars, pairs of stars that orbit around each other so closely that their outer atmospheres touch. As the stars eclipse, they dim and then brighten as one emerges from behind the other. These stars are categorized as variable stars, stars that change brightness, which make up half the stars in the universe.
Lake Highlands High School seniors Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are the first high school researchers at SMU to discover new stars.
New discoveries in Pegasus, Ursa Major are registered with Variable Star Index
The stars are located in the northern sky constellations of Pegasus and Ursa Major, but can’t be seen by the naked eye.
Lake Highlands High School student Dominik Fritz and teacher Ken Taylor at SMU. Fritz participated in Quarknet, an SMU Physics Department program for area high school students. (Photo Credit here)
Working in a campus science building basement laboratory, the students used analysis software, perseverance and patience to parse the data collected (but never analyzed for the purpose of studying binary stars) in 2000 by Robert Kehoe, SMU associate professor of physics.
Kehoe collected the data through ROTSE-I, a prototype robotic telescope at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
“Scientists are driven by the sense of discovery,” says Kehoe, who took the data originally to study gamma ray bursts. “These students can lay claim to information that didn’t exist before their research.”
SMU only university in North Texas offering the nation’s QuarkNet program
Fritz and Barton are among nine high school students and two high school physics teachers conducting physics research at SMU through the QuarkNet program.
QuarkNet is a physics teacher development program with 50 centers at U.S. universities and national laboratories. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, the program gives teachers and students opportunities to learn about the most recent discoveries in physics.
Other sponsors include two of the world’s leading high-energy physics research centers — CERN in Switzerland and Fermilab in Illinois. SMU is one of four Texas universities to offer the QuarkNet program and the only QuarkNet university in North Texas.
“High school physics curriculum includes very little modern physics,” says Simon Dalley, a member of the SMU physics faculty and coordinator of its QuarkNet program. “This hurts recruitment to the field and prevents the general population from understanding physics’ contribution to the modern world.”
Ken Taylor, Lake Highlands High School physics teacher, is determined to introduce new physics research to his students. He has participated in QuarkNet at SMU since 2000, seizing opportunities to join physics researchers at high-energy particle colliders at CERN and Fermilab. This is the first summer he has selected students to join him in physics research at SMU.
“I like to support students beyond the classroom walls,” he says. “These students have gone through the whole process of scientific discovery and can use these projects as jumping off points for the next phases of their lives.”
With acceptance into the VSX catalog of variable stars, the students’ names are forever linked with their stars on the official registry.
But instead of creating new star names, star discoverers follow a protocol that includes the name of the telescope and the stellar coordinates.
Both students plan to pursue science careers, Fritz in nuclear engineering and Barton in medicine.
Other student QuarkNet researchers include KeShawn Ivory from Garland High School and Madison Monzingo and Lane Toungate from Lake Highlands High School. In addition, Hockaday School teacher Leon de Oliveira and his four students – Eliza Cope, Allison Aldrich, Sarah Zhou and Mary Zhong — also conducted QuarkNet research this summer.
“These students have made a real contribution to science,” says Farley Ferrante, the former high school physics teacher and current SMU astrophysics graduate student who supervised the students’ research. “A better understanding of variable stars helps us to understand the age and formation of the universe; the sun, which is a variable star; and even the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.”
Department of Defense awards $2.6 million to SMU STEM program for minority students
