If a neutrino do not interact with anything and can pass through a light year of lead, how humans manage to detect them?

Question

If a neutrino do not interact with anything and can pass through a light year of lead, how humans manage to detect them?

In: 6

Answer 1

Well, the chance of a neutrino interacting with any matter is really really small. Luckily, though:

* The nuclear reactions in the Sun put out a HUGE amount of neutrinos; 100 billion neutrinos pass through your fingernail every second. If we could see in “neutrino” the Sun would shine extremely brightly. We’re basically positioned very close to a huge and constant source of neutrinos.

* The detector facilities are [huge](https://i0.wp.com/eusci.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Kamioka.jpg?fit=786%2C427&ssl=1) and those cameras are sensitive enough to detect the flash of energy from a single interaction.

So basically, the size of the detector is huge, and the amount of neutrinos passing through the Earth is huge, and scientists have built a number of detector facilities. So overall we detect about 30 per day, about one per hour, across all the detector facilities that have been built.