Mice may be key to theory of everything

Roger Highfield reports in the Daily Telegraph on an ambitious new government-funded project on particle physics in Oxfordshire. Good to see. Rutherford Appleton Labs are just down the road from us - and Prof Ken Long is a friend who has lectured at Radley in the past.

Britain has moved a step closer to building a billion-pound factory in Oxfordshire that will bombard the Earth with ghostly particles to probe profound cosmic mysteries. A team at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory wants to use the factory to send the subatomic particles called neutrinos to Italy, and even 5,300 miles through the Earth to an underground laboratory in Japan, to understand the mechanisms of the Big Bang and how our universe was created.

Last week, the ambitious plan obtained Government backing when Science Minister Lord Sainsbury announced a GBP9.7 million investment in the "Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment" (Mice) at the Rutherford, which will help develop ways to mint neutrinos. Because Mice was designed with the help of 140 physicists from around the world, it will obtain significant contributions from abroad. Although modest, the project marks the first step in developing a UK bid to host the international factory.

Mice will be attached to Rutherford's existing Isis facility, which smashes protons into a target to make neutrons. The protons can instead be used to produce particles called muons, which decay to form neutrinos, and in this way Mice will pave the way for the scheme to bombard the planet with the particles.

Read on here or at Telegraph Connected: "Mice may be key to theory of everything".

Prof David Wark of the Rutherford and Imperial College London described the Neutrino Factory, which could go into operation by 2016, as the first experiment to cross so many borders. "The factory would fire beams at two or three targets in Japan, the United States and Italy, so it would be the world's first truly global experiment,'' he said. The particles already rain down on us. Neutrinos from the Sun and from the collapse of stars rush through space, through walls, through the whole Earth, and through readers of The Daily Telegraph, because they interact with other matter with such feeble force. But making more of them on Earth offers a way to crack several tantalising cosmic mysteries.

The Standard Model, the physicists' theory of all the particles in the universe and how they interact, assumes that neutrinos have no mass. The first evidence that this was not so came in experiments by Nobel laureate Raymond Davis. That find was backed by Japan's Super-Kamiokande experiment a few years ago. More support for neutrinos having mass came from an international experiment deep underground in Sudbury, Ontario, where 9,456 sensors record tiny flashes of light given off when neutrinos pass through 1,000 tons of heavy water. By using the factory, physicists hope to gather clues to how to refine - or even abandon - the Standard Model to come up with the long-sought underlying "theory of everything''.

Neutrinos are ghostly relics of creation and, because of this, they could also help scientists to understand why there seems to be so much more matter than antimatter in the universe, when both were made in equal amounts in the Big Bang of creation 12 billion years ago. "It seems possible that the mass tied up in neutrinos may equal that of all the stars and planets put together," said Prof Ken Long of Imperial.

"Furthermore, recent calculations suggest that it may be the interactions of the neutrinos, rather than those of the quarks, that give rise to our matter-dominated universe.'' Prof Long, who leads the UK collaboration, added: "Were the Neutrino Factory to be hosted at the Rutherford it would put the UK at the very forefront of research in this field, and would attract a large inward investment from the members of the international collaboration. I believe that this is the biggest opportunity for the creation of a world-class particle physics facility in the UK that is likely to occur in the next few decades.''