10 YEARS OF BOREXINO

4 September 2017

borexino 2017 For ten years, in the bowels of the Gran Sasso mountain, the Borexino experiment has been scanning the sky above us and the heart of our planet, installed at the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories (LNGS). The tenth anniversary of Borexino’s full operation and of the collection of scientific data was celebrated at LNGS and at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) with an event that attracted the most important physicists and astrophysics in the world, including Art McDonald, Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 2015 for his neutrino studies, Yoichiro Suzuki, Head of Super-Kamiokande, one of the world’s most important neutrino experiments, Victor Matveev, Director of the JINR in Dubna, the most important Russian physics research centre, Masayuki Nakahata, one of the authors of the measurement of the latest supernova explosion detected on Earth, Alexei Smirnov, author of the MSW effect explaining neutrino oscillation, Laura Cadonati, Deputy Head of the LIGO collaboration who, along with the colleagues from the Virgo collaboration, made the historic discovery of gravitational waves, Jim Cao, Vice President of IHEP, the Chinese high energy physics institute, and many others. Their host was Gianpaolo Bellini, creator of Borexino and its coordinator for 22 years, while opening the proceedings were Fernando Ferroni, President of INFN and Stefano Ragazzi, Director of LNGS. With important results ranging from the measurement of the properties of solar neutrinos in a wide energy spectrum, of the Sun’s energy at the time of its generation, to the detection of geoneutrinos and to the first observation in a vacuum of the neutrino oscillation phenomenon, Borexino has had and still has significant resonance in all major international conferences, giving fundamental contributions to our advances in physics, astrophysics and geophysics. These results were made possible thanks to the technological success of Borexino, which holds the world record for the “most radio-pure” experiment in its sector. The experiment, the result of a collaboration between European countries (Italy, Germany, France, Poland), the United States and Russia, will continue its data acquisition for a few more years, improving the accuracy of the measurements already taken as well as addressing new ones.

 

 

You might also be interested in

Positioning of one of the new ARCA detection units ©KM3NeT

ARCA-51 offshore campaign: 10,000 new eyes for KM3NeT

Infographic of the GW231123 event

LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA and the most massive black hole merger ever detected via gravitational waves

Nobel laureate Takaaki Kajita at the event for Einstein Telescope at Expo2025 Osaka

Expo2025 Osaka: Sardinia for Einstein Telescope in the spotlight with Nobel laureate Kajita

The sustainability of ET, interview with Maria Marsella

Research infrastructures shaping the future. A moment of the public event "Driving knowledge and innovation for tomorrow's communities" hosted by the Italy Pavilion at Expo2025 Osaka.

Large research infrastructures and Italy-Japan collaboration in fundamental physics at Expo2025 Osaka

Asimmetrie: The new issue is dedicated to the constants of physics