"An idea, maybe not a good idea, but an idea nonetheless." -anon

Is it possible that the photosite in a CCD would be affected by a neutrino in some detectable way?

With the tiny high resolution CCD and CMOS detectors available today, it would be possible to create a stack of them, slightly offsetting each one, so that a neutrino could not pass through the stack without hitting one or more of the photosites.

Because of the extremely high density of the neutrino flux, if this would work, there would be no need for a massive detector as millions of times per second one or more of the photosites would be hit. This obviously doesn't eliminate the need to bury it deep in the earth but at least a huge cavern full of expensive sensors would not be necessary.

Furthermore, if it works, the track through the layers could determine the direction of the neutrino.

Perhaps it would be necessary to dope the photosites with some impurity.

Does this make any sense?

Bill

A neutrino could pass through a light year of lead with less than a 50-50 chance of hitting anything.

Light takes tens of thousands of years to get from the core of the Sun to the surface. Neutrinos do it in less than three seconds. Neutrinos simply do not interact with other matter.

Welcome to BAUT.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Kaptain K. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory sees ~ a 14% change in the solar neutrino flux on a daily basis attributed to the interposition of the Earth between it and the sun at night....so that's a little bit shorter than a light year of matter. The lead quote so often seen is for capture and inverse beta decay, which is a much smaller cross-section. Scattering is possible with ~ a 10% energy loss from neutral currents. pete

see:http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/

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A third rate theory forbids
A second rate theory explains after the fact
A first rate theory predicts...A. Lomonosov

Neutrinos interact very very seldomly. It is an extremely small probability, so the observed flux would be a very very very small fraction of the actual flux. How you arrange the matter in the CCD array would be almost arbitrary.

The real trick would be to prevent other events (including the thermal noise in the chip itself) from triggering the array. Currently neutrino detectors are buried underground to sheild against other particles, whose cross section of interaction would swamp out the scattered neutrino events.

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