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Artwork by Sandbox Studio, Chicago with Corinne Mucha

Waiting for a sign


0 6 / 1 9 / 1 8 | By Diana Kwon

Some scientists spend decades trying to catch a glimpse of a rare process. But
with good experimental design and a lot of luck, they often need only a handful of
signals to make a discovery.
In 2009, University of Naples physicist Giovanni de Lellis had a routine. Almost
every day, he would sit at a microscope to examine the data from his experiment,
the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus, or OPERA, located in
Gran Sasso, Italy. He was seeking the same thing he had been looking for since
1996, when he was with the CHORUS experiment at CERN: a tau neutrino.

More speci cally, he was looking for evidence of a muon neutrino oscillating into a
tau neutrino.

Neutrinos come in three avors: electron, muon and tau. At the time, scientists
knew that they oscillated, changing avors as they traveled at close to the speed
of light. But they had never seen a muon neutrino transform into a tau neutrino.

Until November 30, 2009. On that day, de Lellis and the rest of the OPERA
collaboration spotted their rst tau neutrino in a beam of muon neutrinos coming
from CERN research center 730 kilometers away.

“Normally, what you would do is look and look, and nothing comes,” says de Lellis,
now spokesperson for the OPERA collaboration. “So it's quite an exciting moment
when you spot your event.”

For physicists seeking rare events, patience is key. Experiments like these often
involve many years of waiting for a signal to appear. Some phenomena, such as
neutrinoless double-beta decay, proton decay and dark matter, continue to elude
researchers, despite decades of searching.

Still, scientists hope that after the lengthy wait, there will be a worthwhile reward.
Finding neutrinoless double-beta decay would let researchers know that neutrinos
are actually their own antiparticles and help explain why there’s more matter than
antimatter. Discovering proton decay would test several grand uni ed theories—
and let us know that one of the key components of atoms doesn’t last forever. And
discovering dark matter would nally tell us what makes up about a quarter of the
mass and energy in the universe.
“These are really hard experiments,” says Reina Maruyama, a physicist at Yale
University working on neutrinoless double-beta decay experiment CUORE
(Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events) as well as a number of
direct dark matter searches. “But they will help answer really fundamental
questions that have implications for how the universe was put together.”

Seeking signs, cutting noise


For the OPERA collaboration, nding a likely tau neutrino candidate was just the
beginning. Hours of additional work, including further analyses and veri cation
from other scientists, were required to con rm that signal didn’t originate from
another source.

Luckily, the rst signal passed all the checks, and the team was able to observe
four more candidate events in the following years. By 2015, the team had gathered
enough data to con dently con rm that muon neutrinos had transformed into tau
neutrinos. More speci cally, they were able to achieve a 5-sigma result, the gold
standard of detection in particle physics, which means there's only a 1 in 3.5
million chance that the signal from an experiment was a uke.

For some experiments, seeing as few as two or three events could be enough to
make a discovery, says Tiziano Camporesi, a physicist working on the CMS
experiment at CERN. This was true when scientists at CERN’s Super Proton
Synchrotron discovered the Z boson, a neutral elementary particle carrying the
weak force, in 1983. “The Z boson discovery was basically made looking at three
events,” Camporesi says, “but these three events were so striking that no other
kind of particle being produced at the accelerator at the time could fake it.”

There are a number of ways scientists can improve their odds of catching an
elusive event. In general, they can boost signals by making their detectors bigger
and by improving the speed and precision with which they record incoming
events.
But a lot depends on background noise: How prevalent are other phenomena that
could create a false signal that looks like the one the scientists are searching for?

When it comes to rare events, scientists often have to go to great lengths to


eliminate—or at least reduce—all sources of potential background noise.
“Designing an experiment that is immune to background is challenging,” says
Augusto Ceccucci, spokesperson for NA62, an experiment searching for an
extremely rare kaon decay.

For its part, NA62 scientists remove background noise by, for example, studying
only the decay products that coincide in time with the passage of incoming
particles from a kaon beam, and carefully identifying the characteristics of signals
that could mimic what they’re looking for so they can eliminate them.

The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment, or SuperCDMS, led by SLAC
National Accelerator Laboratory, goes to great lengths to protect its detectors
from cosmic rays, particles that regularly rain down on Earth from space. To
eliminate this source of background, scientists shield the detectors with iron, ship
them by ground and sea, and operate them deep underground. “So it would not
take many dark matter particles detected to satisfy the 5-sigma detection rule,”
says Fermilab’s Dan Bauer, spokesperson for SuperCDMS.

At particle accelerators, the search for rare phenomena looks a little di erent.
Rather than simply waiting for a particle to show up in a detector, physicists try to
create them in particle collisions. The more elusive a phenomenon is, the more
collisions it requires to nd. Thus, at the Large Hadron Collider, “in order to achieve
smaller and smaller probability of production, we're getting more and more intense
beams,” Camporesi says.

Triangulating the results of di erent experiments can help scientists build a picture
of the particles or processes they’re looking for without actually nding them. For
example, by understanding what dark matter is not, physicists can constrain what
it could be. “You take combinations of di erent experiments and you start rejecting
di erent hypotheses,” Maruyama says.

Only time will tell whether scientists will be able to detect neutrinoless double-beta
decay, proton decay, dark matter or other rare events that have yet to be spotted
at physicists’ detectors. But once they do—and once scientists know what
speci c signatures to nd, Maruyama says, “it becomes a lot easier to look for
these things, and you can go ahead and study the heck out of them.”

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