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The MINOS experiment has now ended. This event was the last beam neutrino we recorded.
Latest Events in various online classifications
Time is in GMT (6 hours ahead of CST). The big window to the right is an "end-on" view, the two small windows in the upper left are top and side views, and the graphs in the lower left are additional timing information. This link has a more detailed explanation of what you're looking at.
Please note that the event classification is based on a fast online reconstruction and is only indicative.
The cosmic ray muon rate in the MINOS Far Detector is about one every couple seconds. This page refreshes once every ten seconds to reduce web load.
Almost all of the tracks shown in this display are produced by cosmic rays, which are produced by high energy particles from space hitting the upper atmosphere. They are around us on both the surface and for about two miles underground all the time. Only about one in a million events observed in the MINOS far detector comes from the neutrino beam from Fermilab. In fact, this is why the experiment is so far underground. On the surface (without all that rock to slow down the cosmic rays) seeing the very rare neutrino would be 100,000 times harder. Click here for more information about the experiment.
Here is a picture of our first beam-neutrino event seen in the Far Detector! In this event, the neutrino interacted in the rock in front of the detector, and the resulting muon entered the south face of the detector, spiraling in the magnetic field, before stopping in the second half
Here is a 3D rendering of a beam muon-neutrino interaction seen in the far detector. Note that it starts inside the detector where the neutrino interacted with an iron nucleus to produce a charge muon lepton. The resulting muon travels through many layers of steel, producing light as it goes (which are reconstructed to be the dots seen in the image). As the muon loses energy the detector's magnetic field causes it to curve more strongly, and the muon eventually runs out of steam and stops. Both the distance traveled and the degree of curvature produce a muon momentum estimate of 3.5 GeV/c. A different view of this event, showing how alternating U and V views are used to localize the path of the particle in MINOS is here.
