Tuesday, June 1, 2010

The Gran Sasso National Laboratory




Professor Piero Tognolatti, Director of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of L'Aquila set up a tour of the Gran Sasso Lab today. We drove to the lab and met Dr. Adraino Di Giovanni of the LNGS who hosted our tour. We drove from the lab in the mountains to the tunnel that is the home of the lab. The tunnel between L'Aquila and Teramo is 10 km long and it there is a turn into the labs located 1,400 meters below the top of the mountain. The lab is about 120 km from Rome and is a worldwide structure used by scientists from 24 countries including several in the US. We saw experiments conducted by researchers from Princeton and Cal Tech. Currently, 750 scientists are working on 15 separate experiments. The structure consists of three large experimental halls, each 100 m long and 20 m wide and 18 m high. The location within the mountain keeps the labs at a temperature of about 6-10 C. By having the lab located in the mountain, at more than 1,400 meters of rock above the lab, it is able to reduce the flux of cosmic rays by a million times. Particle physics and nuclear physics are being conducted in the labs. WARP researchers are working on the external site of cryostate. Every day, several billions of muon neutrinos are artifically created at CERN in Geneva. Scientist seek to detect some which have changed charactistics along the way from CERN to Gran Sasso, transforming themselves into tau neutrinis. Due to the extremely small probability that neutrinos interact with matter, it is necessary to use huge experimental apparata containing materials capable of revealing the charactistics of neutrino interactions within. This was witnessed two day before our arrival for the first time in thirty years. The tour was fascinating and the equipment and labs extremely impressive. Pictures of the visit are in this blog.

2 comments:

  1. Man, that is absolutely amazing! You've certainly absorbed a lot of that Scientific jargon, too. When are you going for another degree in Physics? And who is the Italian Actress-type with you and the professor? Your wife will NOT like that!!

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  2. This is earthquake forecast for Sicily,Italy:
    1. Date: May 28, 2011
    2. Time: 4h(GMT)
    3. Location: Sicily,Italy,Eorope
    4. Magnitude: <=M5.3
    5. Prob.:100%
    6. Error: Radius=300 km and time:+-20h
    ==========================
    More:
    http://forecastingearthquakes.yolasite.com
    http://earthquake-prediction.hit.bg
    You see Japan quake predicted.
    You see exhibition wtih predicted earthquakes in Bulgarian newspapers.
    ===========================
    Please, let some organized global competition forecasting earthquakes.

    ReplyDelete