Trails of tiny particles leave physicists beaming

According to the 2007 Guinness Book of World Records, the world's most powerful beam of neutrinos is the one that zips underground from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago to a 5,000-ton detector in the Soudan Underground Laboratory, a unique physics laboratory located in northern Minnesota and operated by the School of Physics and Astronomy.

Called neutrinos (Italian for "little neutral ones"), these subatomic particles may hold the key to the origins of the neutrons, protons, and electrons that form the world we see. They have been under investigation for years, and the University of Minnesota is playing a key role in the most precise experiment to capture their essence. More...