About 80 kilometers off the Sicilian coast of Portopalo di Capo Passero, a new neutrino with an exceptional and unprecedented energy charge has been discovered. Researchers tracked down the particle thanks to the KM3NeT undersea neutrino telescope on Feb. 13, 2023, and after two years spent conducting analysis and in-depth investigations, they decided to confirm the discovery with a paper in the journal Nature, which also dedicated the month’s cover to it. The discovery is due to an international team in which Italy plays a leading role with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics INFN and thanks to funding from the Ministry of University and Research and the Region of Sicily.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that have been a subject of extensive study in particle physics, and their properties hold the key to understanding many fundamental aspects of the universe, such as astrophysics or cosmology, as well as fundamental physics.
But there is still an aura of mystery shrouding the discovery as at the moment, experts point out that it is still unclear whether this extraordinary particle comes from the Milky Way or from outside our galaxy. According to Marco Pallavicini, vice president of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, “the discovery marks a milestone in neutrino astronomy.”
In detail, as the study shows, the particle, which has been christened KM3-230213A, has the record energy of 220 million billion electron volts (220 PeV), which is 20,000 times the energy at which the world’s largest particle accelerator, namely Cern’s Lhc, accelerates particles. “It opens a new window of observation on the Universe,” comments Paschal Coyle of the CNRS Center for Particle Physics in Marseille, who participated in the research.
As for the future of the neutrino record, researchers are excited to continue studying it to understand more about its origins and potential for science. “The extremely high energy places it in a totally unexplored region of extreme interest to science, says Rosa Coniglione, INFN researcher at the National Laboratories of the South and deputy coordinator of the KM3NeT collaboration. Giacomo Cuttone, INFN national manager for KM3NeT, also notes, “Such high energy is not easy to frame in our galaxy: new scenarios open up and now the challenge is to understand possible mechanisms that could have generated it.”
