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and could run for another 20 years, experts said.
• "What CERN (the European collider operator) did for the Higgs boson, we want to do with the neutrino," said Joe Lykken, a particle theorist at Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Chicago. That lab would create the beam and aim it at an old mine in Lead, South Dakota. There, scientists hope a 50,000-ton detector would be able to spot an incredibly minute fraction of the particles.
• Tiny and nearly mass-less, neutrinos are everywhere. About 100 trillion zip through us harmlessly each second. They were created by the Big Bang. They also form in the sun and our own bodies, but they are so fast and small that scientists have barely detected them for study.
• "Of the known particles, the neutrinos as a group are the most oddball," Ritz said.
• Neutrinos are a group because they come in three types, or "flavors," and they can shift from one type to another. Scientists don't quite know why, Lykken said.
• If a neutrino is eventually beamed from Chicago, "it starts out as a chocolate milkshake, but it's partly strawberry by the time it gets to South Dakota," Lykken said.
• He added, "You study the oddball in order to get insights into everything else."
• Neutrinos could give scientists clues about the mysterious "dark matter" of outer space and other "weird astrophysical phenomena," said California Institute of Technology physicist Sean Carroll, who wasn't part of the scientific panel.
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