Professor Liliana Caballero is one of 2017's Neutrino Question Winners - Neutrino Physics Center at Fermilab

Posted on Monday, January 29th, 2018

The Neutrino Physics Center at Fermilab "serves to foster communication between experimentalists on different neutrino experiments, between experimentalists and theorists, and between theorists, within the international neutrino user community and from Fermilab". The Center periodically has a "Question of the Week" for the community, and announces the winning submission shortly after.

Professor Caballero submitted an answer to the question: "How would a neutron star merger, in our Galaxy, be seen in DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment)?"

Her answer: "A neutron-star merger in our Galaxy, involving either two neutron stars or a black hole with a neutron star, is a catastrophic event which will certainly be noticed on Earth. In addition to the strong gravitational waves and electromagnetic emissions that will be captured at specialized observatories, the merger will be close enough that neutrino signals will be triggers in several facilities. The 40,000 tons of Liquid Argon at DUNE could register thousands of neutrino-Argon and hundreds of neutrino-electron scattering events. The neutrino emission will last up to a few hundred milliseconds and their typical energy is O(5~50 MeV), depending on whether the initial binary included a black hole or not."

The announcement of the winning answer was made on fnal.gov (rotating slideshow). There were a total of nine winners in 2017.

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