Studying Terrestrial Neutrinos with KamLAND (and NERSC!)
March 22, 2007
KamLAND is a large underground detector in Japan studying neutrinos from terrestrial sources. The primary aim of KamLAND is to study electron anti-neutrinos that are produced in the decay of radioactive products in nuclear power reactors. KamLAND established beyond doubt that these neutrinos change their "flavor" from their point of origin to the detector and determined that neutrinos have mass and that therefore the Standard Model of Particle Physics is incomplete. A secondary aim of KamLAND is to study geologically produced anti-neutrinos, these tell us something about the radiogenically produced heat in the mantle, a yet unknown quantity. The main analysis center for the KamLAND US group is the NERSC facility and for both these core analyses the NERSC facility has been essential. I will describe the science behind KamLAND and describe how we use the NERSC HPSS and PDSF facilities. KamLAND is currently gearing up to also study neutrinos from the Sun and I will describe how we plan to use NERSC in the future.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary high-performance computing facility for scientific research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the NERSC Center serves more than 4,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in combustion, climate modeling, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. DOE Office of Science. For more information about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab, please visit www.lbl.gov/cs.
