Every second, 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body. They travel at nearly the speed of light, carry secrets of the cosmos, and barely interact with anything. Welcome to the hunt for the universe's most elusive particle.
Neutrinos are fundamental subatomic particles with almost no mass and no electric charge. They interact only via the weak nuclear force and gravity — making them nearly impossible to detect. They pass straight through the Earth, the Sun, and even you, without stopping.
First proposed by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 and detected in 1956, neutrinos have since upended particle physics. Their having mass — confirmed in 1998 — earned the 2015 Nobel Prize and changed our understanding of the Standard Model forever.
They are the second-most abundant particle in the universe after photons. Roughly 340 cosmic background neutrinos from the Big Bang occupy every cubic centimetre of space — everywhere.
Learn the PhysicsNeutrinos are produced in the most energetic events in the universe — from nuclear fusion in stars to cataclysmic black hole jets billions of light-years away.
Nuclear fusion in the solar core produces ~65 billion neutrinos per cm² per second at Earth's surface. Detecting and counting them revealed the solar neutrino problem — and eventually, neutrino oscillations.
A collapsing stellar core releases 99% of its gravitational energy as neutrinos in a 10-second burst. SN 1987A delivered 25 detectable neutrinos from 168,000 light-years — launching neutrino astronomy.
Fission reactors are powerful electron antineutrino factories. They've been used to measure oscillation parameters, constrain sterile neutrinos, and even monitor nuclear activities remotely.
Radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth's mantle and crust produces a flux of geoneutrinos. Borexino and KamLAND have measured these, constraining Earth's radiogenic heat budget.
Supermassive black holes accelerate particles to extreme energies, creating astrophysical neutrinos at PeV scales. IceCube has linked events to TXS 0506+056 and NGC 1068.
High-energy cosmic rays striking Earth's atmosphere produce a continuous rain of atmospheric neutrinos via pion and kaon decays — the same source that revealed atmospheric oscillations.
Breaking results from the global network of neutrino experiments.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole confirmed the detection of a neutrino with energy exceeding 10 PeV — the most energetic ever recorded, potent…
Canada's SNO+ experiment in the SNOLAB facility at Sudbury has successfully completed filling with liquid scintillator (linear alkylbenzene), dramatically boost…
The KM3NeT deep-sea detector array has independently confirmed an astrophysical neutrino flux consistent with IceCube's results, strengthening the case for extr…
From a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice to kilometres-deep Mediterranean sea arrays, humanity has built extraordinary machines to catch these ghost particles. Explore the global network.