An essay on why I am a Neutrino Physicist, written for a book of portraits of scientists by

Mariana Cooke, in publication

You can't see them but they're everywhere. There are 60 billion in front of your nose
this second. You can't smell them. You can't taste them when they touch your tongue.
You can't hear them. You can't feel them when they pass through you.
10,000,000,000,000,000 will do it while you read this page and you will never know.
They are neutrinos, the ``little neutral ones'' in the family of subatomic particles.
Neutrinos hold secrets from the earliest days of the universe. They bring us
information from deep inside exploding stars and from high energy particle collisions.
Their presence may signal unexpected phenomena. Measuring their properties will
help us understand how the universe will evolve.
We search for neutrinos using detectors all around the world. My experiment is at
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located just outside of Chicago. Our detector,
MiniBooNE, is a forty foot high sphere, filled with mineral oil. When the neutrinos
interact in the oil, they make small flashes of light which are seen by phototubes,
which work essentially like inverse light bulbs: light goes in, an electrical pulse comes
out. The phototubes are 8-inch diameter circles that are beautiful dark amber. When
we installed them on the ceiling of the detector, MiniBooNE looked like a bizarre,
beautiful planetarium with many moons and tiny stars that were the screws holding
the tubes onto their black support structure. Despite being made of 800 tons of oil,
MiniBooNE is actually quite mini compared to other neutrino experiments. The most
awesomely large neutrino detector, Super-K, is located in Japan. A fifteen story
building can fit comfortably within that detector!
We need such large detectors because neutrinos don't interact with matter very often.
Most subatomic particles are very interactive. For example, quarks, which make up
most of ordinary matter, are so active in our detectors that it is difficult to sort out the
patterns that they leave. The electron is another highly evident particle -- and reliable,
too. You can count on finding electrons inside your typical wall outlet and also inside
your typical particle interaction. But the neutrino is different from the rest. Their
interactions occur far more rarely. At the highest energy accelerator in the world,
Fermilab, we observe neutrino reactions 10,000,000,000 times less often than those of
quarks. They just quietly zip through the detector and go on their merry way.
Neutrino research is fascinating today because the results are full of contradictions.
For fifty years, all of the evidence pointed to neutrinos being bundles of moving
energy that had no mass -- a pretty weird concept for a particle. But recently we
discovered a novel behavior which can only be explained if neutrinos do have mass.
How do resolve this conflict?
If the neutrino has mass, it must be very, very small. It would take at least half a
million neutrinos to tip the scales on the electron. Still, such a wispy particle will have
a big effect in the universe. The collective mass of the neutrinos rivals the mass of all
the stars! Given the discovery of mass, we can begin asking even more exciting
questions. The Big Bang, for example, produced a million neutrinos in every gallon of
space. The holy grail of neutrino physics is to detect these relics. Their mass may hold

the key.
All of that sounds pretty esoteric, and you may ask: ``What have neutrinos done for
me lately?'' Actually, they matter a lot to you. They are part of the ignition process of
the sun. They play a role in heating the center of the earth, causing continental drift.
So the next time you see a koala, whose evolution depended on living on an isolated
continent, thank a neutrino! The tools that physicists use to create and study neutrinos
have direct benefit to every one of us. One fork of the beam line for our neutrino
experiment at the Fermilab goes to Neutron Therapy, a very successful cancer
treatment method. The extremely clean laboratory environment of state-of-the-art
solar neutrino experiments can be used for sensitive tests to monitor violations of the
nuclear test ban treaty.
I love this particle because it always reminds me that even the smallest among us can
change the universe.