Heavy water · Welcome to the Nobel Prize Laureate Collection

ID-nummer

2015.018.001

Titel

Heavy water

Objektkategori

Vetenskapliga instrument, material & modeller

Publik beskrivning

Arthur McDonald has let heavy water represent his research at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO). The bottles on the scales contain equal volumes of heavy and regular water respectively. As the scales show, the density of heavy water is about ten per cent higher.

(SNO) was an underground facility where physicists from Canada, the US and the UK studied neutrinos, some of the universe's smallest and most elusive particles. Almost all neutrinos zip unimpeded through the earth, but some of could be captured in the SNO detector. The detector used heavy water, where the nucleus of the hydrogen atoms has both a proton and a neutron. Heavy water allows the neutrinos to react differently than with regular water.

Arthur McDonald donated the heavy water to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2015.

Pristagare

Arthur B. McDonald