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JANET CONRAD: So I really
love teaching Junior Lab.

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And I really like it
the way that it is.

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I like its structure
and so forth.

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But you cannot sit in that lab
and not come up with new ideas

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for experiments.

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And I have one that I
would really love to do.

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I am on a neutrino experiment.

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I was the head of the neutrino
experiment for a while, which

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was called MiniBooNE.

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MiniBooNE stands for
Booster Neutrino Experiment.

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So MiniBooNE was a small
Booster Neutrino Experiment.

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And in neutrino physics,
small is 800 tons.

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It's [CHUCKLES] 40 feet high.

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It's a big detector.

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And inside of it, it had all
of these photo detectors that

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lined the inside and when a
neutrino interaction occurred,

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you got a little
bit of light that

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came out from the
charged particle

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that the neutrino produced.

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It turns out that charged
particle was traveling faster

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than the speed of
light in a medium,

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in the oil that was
in the detector.

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Nothing goes faster than the
speed of light in a vacuum,

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but things can go faster than
the speed of light in material.

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When that happens,
you get the equivalent

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of a sonic boom, a
kind of photonic boom.

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Bam, out come a whole
bunch of photons.

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And people love this idea
that things can go faster

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than the speed of light.

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And it's really so
neat to see that light.

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It's called shrink of light.

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And so, what I
would like to do, is

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I would like to build a small
version of my experiment

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MiniBooNE, which we
would call TinyBooNE.

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[CHUCKLES] And TinyBooNE would
be about one meter across.

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And it would have photo
detectors, tiny little photo

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detectors.

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They're called silicon
photo-multipliers.

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All along one side.

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And we would put a beta
source in the middle of it.

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And out would come in electron.

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That electron, if you choose
the right beta source,

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is actually high enough
energy that it will actually

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produce a little bit
of Cherenkov light.

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And you can actually
see the Cherenkov light.

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And so as with any of the
Junior Lab experiments,

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we have to have two
things you can measure.

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All the Junior Lab
experiments are

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designed so there's two
things you can measure.

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One which one partner
focuses on and one which

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the other partner focuses on.

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And so the things that you
would measure in TinyBooNE,

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one of them would be how
the Cherenkov light turns on

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with energy, given the source,
which would be a strontium

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to yttrium source.

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And then the other would
be to use that beta decay

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spectrum to set a mass limit.

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Not a very good mass
limit, but a mass

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limit on the mass
of the neutrino.

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And I think it
would be really fun.

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I would just love to build this.

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It's just not possible
to sit in there

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and not dream up what
experiment you would like to do.