Ski Sickness

Some skiers happily wash dishes to support their downhill habit, others study subatomic particles in hopes of discovering the fundamental orchestration of the universe. Take Sky Sjue, for example.

Sjue is at the cyclotron facility at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. It’s his third trip here to study the rare electronic-capture decay of technetium-100 for his PhD dissertation. The university is one of the few places on Earth that has the tools for the job, and the process sounds out of this world.

Protons accelerate in expanding spiral trajectories until they reach approximately one-sixth the speed of light. Accelerated protons are guided to a target where they collide with molybdenum foil with the mass-100 isotope enriched to 97.4 percent. But that’s not all. An array of electrodes, buffer gases, and magnets guide and filter the reaction products until they eventually create an isobarically pure mass-100 beam consisting of roughly half molybdenum and half technetium.

The electron-capture decay offers important data for gauging the utility of molybdenum as a hypothetical detector for the most abundant (and lowest energy) neutrinos emitted from the sun. It’s also an effective method to test theories regarding the fundamental nature of the neutrino—a particle associated with dark matter, which may constitute approximately a fifth of the energy density of the universe, and which may provide clues toward a grand unified theory.

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