Curious
In: Physics
Neutrinos are incredibly hard to detect, so the equipment to detect them needs to be extremely sensitive. That leads it to being easily affected by interference from the surface. Putting it underground makes it easier to isolate the neutrinos’ signal from anything else.
Neutrinos are one of the very smallest particles, and have no charge. They don’t interact with things very often, it’s not unreasonable for a neutrino to pass through the entire earth without colliding with anything.
The equipment has to be extremely sensitive to detect anything, so terrestrial radiation, electric fields from power lines, all kinds of things can interfere with it. Underground the equipment is isolated from those interferences but still just as likely to catch a neutrino
/u/Rswordsman is dead on, but it’s worth noting that this is pretty specific to certain kinds of labs like those designed to detect neutrinos or gravitational waves.
Most scientific equipment is not underground.
This is really only true for neutrino detectors. That’s because neutrinos are extremely hard to detect because they almost never interact with matter at all. About a hundred *trillion* neutrinos pass completely through your body every second and you don’t even know it. Most neutrinos pass completely through the Earth without interacting with it at all. Building the detectors underground isolates the detectors from sources of interference (especially cosmic rays) that can’t penetrate deep underground. That way we can be sure that the detectors are actually detecting neutrinos and not just interference or other random noise.
It’s really just for Neutrinos. Neutrinos are weird little particles that can pass through everything so we made an observatory only Neutrinos can enter.
Latest Answers