“The neutrinos are just leaving the earth right there in the woods and flying off into space,” says Menary. “It’s an amazing opportunity -- physics just waiting to be done.”

Neutrinos are particles which make up much of what surrounds us -- comprising about half of the mass of the universe. They are produced in huge numbers in the fusion process that fuels stars. Researchers theorize that as the only surviving particles left over from the moments just after the Big Bang, they could explain one of the great mysteries of science: What happened to all the antimatter that was produced at the birth of the universe?

Menary is spearheading the Canadian arm of a proposed international project to study a laboratory-produced beam of neutrinos. The beam originates at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory located just west of Chicago, the output of a several hundred million dollar facility which is streaming the neutrinos through the earth. Menary, along with a group of prominent researchers from around the world, is keen to take advantage of the fact that the beam exits the ground mere kilometres from the Trans Canada Highway, in northwestern Ontario.

“Our challenge will be to catch them,” Menary says.

“Despite the fact that there are hundreds of billions of neutrinos from the Sun going straight through each of us right now, you need a huge piece of equipment to catch even one.”

The proposed project will use a 50,000 tonne liquid argon tank to trap the particles, in order to study a spooky, quantum mechanical phenomenon known as ‘neutrino oscillations’ -- how they change states as they traverse space.

But because neutrinos so rarely interact with atoms, Menary says it will take about a decade just to gather a significant number for study.

Menary hopes to have the project up and running by 2010, a wait he describes as “fairly short term…for a high-energy physicist.”

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For further information, please contact:

Melissa Hughes, Media Relations, York University, 416-736-2100 x 22097/ mehughes@yorku.ca