PHYSICISTS and cosmologists do not tend to seek justification for their expensive experiments by flagging up the great practical benefits that might result. Investigations into the origins and nature of the universe are, quite rightly, considered important enough on their own. Yet blue-sky research often has unexpected outcomes, and they are worth celebrating. If nothing else, they can help bridge the conceptual gap between exotica such as neutrinos and dark matter, and more mundane concerns.
There are plenty of examples to choose from. Researchers at the (MINOS) experiment deep inside an old mine in Soudan, Minnesota, recently announced that their detector, which is designed to look for neutrinos, those most elusive of subatomic particles, could also help with weather forecasting. It turns out that the number of particles known as muons picked up by the detector varies according to conditions in the upper atmosphere, which affect the weather lower down.
Then there’s the experiment inside the Gran Sasso Mountain in Italy. The CRESST detector is designed to spot dark matter particles, but the technology has been co-opted to study various properties of biomolecules. Researchers usually do this in mass spectrometers, accelerating the particles to energies of a few tens of kiloelectronvolts and seeing how fast they travel. This technique is not very good at telling apart heavy molecules, because at a given energy they are moving quite slowly. But by combining it with technology used in the CRESST detector, which can measure the energy of a particle smashing into a super-cold sapphire crystal regardless of its velocity, it is possible to detect tiny amounts of heavy molecules like insulin.
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“Cracking in the cold crystal was very similar to the cracking that earthquakes produce in rocks”
There’s more. During early runs of their experiment, the CRESST team discovered that their sapphire crystal, which is held between two sapphire balls, was cracking at temperatures of about 10 millikelvin as the clamp around it shrank. “We must have the world’s best collection of data on cracks,” says Leo Stodolsky of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany. It struck the team that the relationship between the number and energy of cracks , and that this might be put to good use. “Maybe there is a universal principle behind it,” says Stodolsky. One day such data could be applied to predict big earthquakes.
What better way to bring blue-sky thinking down to earth.