- Explore the universe with neutrinos!
- Provides easy-to-understand explanations of the history of the discovery, nature and observation of neutrinos
- Discusses open questions in neutrino research
Did you know that more than a hundred trillion neutrinos rush through your body every second? However, neutrinos interact with their environment incredibly rarely – it is precisely this property that makes them so interesting for astronomy: they reach us from regions of the cosmos from which no ray of light can ever penetrate. They can give us information from the interior of the Sun, from where the nuclear reactions that provide our central star with its energy take place. They fly thousands of light years through the compact regions at the centre of our galaxy. And they even escape from the cosmic hells found inside so-called active galaxies, the places in the universe where the most powerful energy bursts that may exist occur.
Our journey of discovery through the cosmos is also a trip to the underworld: neutrino telescopes are located in ore mines, along tunnels through mighty mountain ranges, in the deep waters of Lake Baikal and in the kilometre-thick ice sheet of the South Pole.
This book will teach you why "ghost particles" can be used to explore our universe, how neutrinos are created, what problems their observation poses for researchers, and what mysteries they still hold.
Table of contents:
- Portrait of a strange particle
- Neutrinos are everywhere
- Silent witnesses of the Big Bang
- A look inside the sun
- A banging finale: neutrinos from supernova explosions
- Neutrinos from cosmic accelerators
- The Earth is being X-rayed
The author Christian Spiering received his doctorate in particle physics from Humboldt University. He played a key role in setting up the neutrino telescopes in Lake Baikal in Siberia and at the South Pole, including as spokesperson for the IceCube experiment. Until his retirement, he headed the Neutrino Astrophysics Working Group at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Zeuthen.
