• Question: At CERN a beam of neutrinos is fired to a lab in Italy. How can they be so accurately fired over such a long distance?

    Asked by freddie to Suzie on 23 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Suzie Sheehy

      Suzie Sheehy answered on 23 Mar 2011:

      Hi there good question. The neutrinos (as I think you know, given your questions) don’t interact very much at all, so there is no problem with them reaching italy. You’re right, it is a very exact problem to get the beam going in a straight line all that way! I’m not entirely sure how they do it but I suspect that the beam spreads out a bit as it travels, and the detectors at the other end are quite large. So they might not catch the whole beam at the other end, but only a part of it…
      You can direct beams quite accurately using magnetic fields to steer them, but this is before the neutrino production step (which are neutral, so you can’t steer them using magnets)
      Hope that helps!

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