BRENT: Scientists with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new tabletop instrument that has ability to detect individual electrons in a radioactive gas. This new development is being considered as big step toward measuring the mass of a neutrino that is a particle smaller than an atom and has no electrical charge.
“We can literally image the frequency of the electron, and we see this electron suddenly pop into our radio antenna,” Joe Formaggio, an associate professor of physics at MIT, said in a statement. “Over time, the frequency changes, and actually chirps up. So these electrons are chirping in radio waves.”
In this new study the researchers recorded the activity of over 100,000 individual electrons in Krypton gas. The newsly developed instrument can help measure the mass of a neutrino that is believed to be extremely hard to detect as it doesn’t appear to interact with ordinary matter.
“We have [the mass] cornered, but haven’t measured it yet,” Formaggio said. “The name of the game is to measure the energy of an electron — that’s your signature that tells you about the neutrino.”
The researchers took five years to develop a perfect detector that after it was turned on for the first time recorded individual electrons within the first one hundred milliseconds of the beginning of the experiment.
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