Physicists introduce method for mechanical detection of individual nuclear decays

admin October 06, 2024

Mechanical detection of individual nuclear disintegrations

Graduate student Jiaxiang Wang works on the optical trap used for this work. Credit: Yale Wright Lab.

In recent years, physicists and engineers have developed increasingly sophisticated instruments to study particles and their interactions with great precision. These instruments, which include particle detectors, sensors and accelerometers, could help researchers study physical processes in greater detail, potentially contributing to exciting new discoveries.

Researchers at Yale University recently presented a new method for mechanically detecting individual nuclear decay, the process by which an unstable atomic nucleus loses energy through the emission of radiation. Their proposed approach, described in a paper published in Physical Exam Lettersis sensitive to all particles emitted during decay, including neutral particles, which are difficult or impossible to detect using existing methods.

“Our group is developing sensitive micron-scale force sensors and accelerometers using particles optically trapped in a vacuum,” David C. Moore, a co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. “Recently, the sensitivity of these systems has become so good that we realized we could detect forces transmitted by a single fundamental particle, such as an alpha particle emitted during nuclear decay.”

The main goal of Moore and his colleagues’ recent research was to develop new techniques to detect nuclear decays by exploiting the forces transmitted by individual fundamental particles. Such techniques would eventually allow them to detect particles that have no electrical charge (i.e., neutral particles), which can be particularly difficult to detect using conventional detectors.

Mechanical detection of individual nuclear disintegrations

An optically trapped microsphere recoils as an alpha particle emitted by a single decaying nucleus inside escapes. Credit: Yale Wright Lab.

“Our approach involves monitoring the motion of a dust-sized particle with radioactive nuclei embedded in it,” Moore says. “If a single nucleus in the dust particle decays, we can detect it by observing a change in the particle’s electrical charge as charged particles such as alpha or beta particles escape.”

In their first experiments, the team showed that their method could detect individual nuclear disintegrations. In particular, the researchers were able to observe the complete recoil of a particle at a precise scale of a few tens of nanometers, by carefully measuring the position of a sphere in their device from the laser light scattered by it.

“Our approach allows us to detect individual decays occurring within particles even if they occur very rarely, such as only once a day,” Moore said. “This could allow us to study dust-sized particles relevant to nuclear surveillance and nonproliferation, and to detect individual decays of long-lived isotopes.”

This work could soon open up interesting perspectives for particle physics research. The promising detection method they have introduced could, for example, be used to search for dark matter and exotic particles or advance the study of nuclear processes and neutral particles that elude traditional detectors.

“In our future work, we want to extend the same techniques to smaller nanoparticles,” Moore added. “This will allow us to detect the momentum generated by a single neutrino escaping the sphere. Neutrinos interact so weakly that they would escape undetected, but this new technique could provide new tools to study these elusive particles.”

More information:

Jiaxiang Wang et al, Mechanical detection of nuclear disintegrations, Physical Exam Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.023602. On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2402.13257

Quote:Physicists introduce method for mechanical detection of individual nuclear decays (2024, July 26) retrieved July 26, 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2024-07-physicists-method-mechanical-individual-nuclear.html

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