CROSS CUTS STAR WARS

Physicists north and south of the border are wondering who will produce the most significant experiment in the next decade in their field of science.

Physicists in the U.S. are debating where to build a $6-billion particle accelerator which could be used to investigate properties of the elementary particles of nature. The accelerator is projected to be 60 miles in diameter.

Meanwhile physicists in Sudbury and Kingston, Ont., are excited about the prospects of building a detector for detecting fast- moving, massless, sub- atomic particles known as “neutrinoes.” They are believed to originate deep inside the sun. Designed to detect the presence of neutrinoes by recording the flashes of light that are generated when they pass through a fluid medium, the Sudbury detector — an acrylic tank filled with 1,000 tonnes of heavy water shielded from cosmic and natural background radiation — would be built in a 20-sq-m opening on the 6,800-ft level of Inco’s Creighton mine, one of the deepest in North America. A similar experiment a few years ago, at the shallower Homestake mine in South Dakota, used chlorinated cleaning fluid as a detecting fluid. This detector measured only one third of the number of neutrinoes predicted by physicists. So the deeper, better-shielded Canadian experiment has been proposed.

This experiment, which will cost an estimated $15 million, will be financed largely by the National Science and Engineering Research Council.