Science: Tiny Secrets

Buried deep in a burrow and shielded by massive steel slabs, one of the newest gadgets at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Laboratory is sighted in on the smallest and most mysterious components of the universe. In their massive spark chamber with its inch-thick aluminum plates, Brookhaven’s atomic physicists hope to trap and study elusive particles that now are little more than factors in abstruse equations. With luck, they may even capture the elusive neutrino.

Trapping a neutrino will be no mean trick. For the little particle is so small that it has no mass at all; it carries no electric charge and will be detectable only as a swiftly moving speck of energy. But the new Brookhaven spark chamber, designed by Drs. Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger of Columbia University, has already proved to be remarkably sensitive. The spaces between its plates are filled with neon gas, and when alternate plates are charged with 10,000 volts of electricity, bright streams of sparks streak across the chamber at jagged angles. Those sparks trace the track of cosmic rays, high-energy particles striking down from outer space.

Just beyond the spark chamber, shielded by many feet of concrete and steel, curves the half-mile ring of Brookhaven’s 30-bev (30 billion electron volts) synchrotron, world’s largest atom smasher. If the physicists’ calculations are correct, when the synchrotron goes into operation one of its products will be a vast number of neutrinos, snippets of energy powerful enough to penetrate the shielding and slip into the chamber, where they may be spotted by means of spark trails. Scientists expect to decipher the trails and learn some of the deepest secrets of the universe (see below).