If a neutrino do not interact with anything and can pass through a light year of lead, how humans manage to detect them?
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It isn’t that neutrinos don’t interact at all, but that the probability of an interaction is extremely, low. We basically detect them by setting up a huge vat of liquid (water, liquid argon, mineral oil, etc) with a lot of photomultiplier tubes (these detect light). After, we use a particle accelerator to send a beam of neutrinos through the earth towards the aforementioned detector, and because of the low probability of interaction, they just make it there. Also because of the low interaction probability, you have to send a lot of neutrinos over a relatively sustained period of time for you to get any real data. In addition, neutrinos coming from space also pass through and may be detected.
The photons resulting from particle interactions within the detector gives us more information about the particles passing through, like mass, speed, etc. Using this information, we can find out which of these interactions are neutrinos, as neutrinos are not the only particles that pass through the detector. There’s more involved, but this is one facet.
If you want to read up on neutrino experiments:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniBooNE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniBooNE)
[https://www.dunescience.org/](https://www.dunescience.org/)
[https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/protodune-in-pictures](https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/protodune-in-pictures) –this one may be of particular interest to you, as it concerns the construction of a liquid argon detector
I’m no expert, but this is my understanding of the topic! Hope it helped. If anyone wants to add to/correct anything, please do.
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