A good week for neutrinos: highest-power beam delivers oscillations, space delivers highest energy

The NOIA far detector, at Ash River Minnesota, measures neutrinos fired from Fermilab in Chicago - 800 km away. This week NOIA reported data showing that they change types during that journey; the begining of what promises to be an exciting programme of precision neutrino physics. And meanwhile, in Antarctica...

I'm writing this in a coffee bar in Chicago. The 'windy city' seems quiet and still this morning and the coffee is surprisingly good. About 80 km to the west, at Fermilab, the highest-powered beam of neutrinos in the world is being produced, and fired through hundreds of kilometres of solid rock to impatiently-waiting detectors, principally the new NOIA far detector.

The reason for my visit is the annual Boost meeting, more related to the Large Hadron Collider than to neutrinos. Fermilab hosted the previous highest-energy particle-collider, the Tevatron, and there is a big community of high-energy physicists in and around Chicago who now work on the LHC. Some of them are hosting us this week. But these days neutrinos are the focus of the accelerator programme down the road^1.