2006 ORION Award Discovery Award Winner

Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) Team

SNO Director Dr. Art McDonald, accepting the ORION Discovery Award on behalf of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) Team at the annual ORION Award ceremonies, in Toronto, June 5, 2006.

Two kilometres below the earth’s surface near Sudbury, lies the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), a facility known as “Canada’s Eye on the Universe.” This facility, in INCO’s Creighton Mine, is the lowest-radioactivity experimental location in the world. The international team of SNO scientists are working together to uncover the mysteries of the sun using tiny fundamental particles called neutrinos that are produced by the nuclear reactions that power the sun. They have confirmed our understanding of how energy is produced in the sun and have found new properties of neutrinos that change the laws of physics at the most fundamental level. SNO has given Canada strong international recognition as a major training ground for particle, nuclear and astrophysicists from around the world.

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is a $100 million international particle astrophysics project that uses the advanced networking link provided by ORION, Ontario’s leading-edge research and education network, to enable the 130 international scientists to measure flux, energy and direction of electron-neutrinos produced in the sun. Data is received directly from the experiment to their desktops, equipment is monitored remotely and complex calculations are performed using high-performance computing resources. This global-scale collaboration involves several Ontario partners, including Queen’s, Laurentian, Carleton, and Guelph Universities, as well as the involvement of colleagues at the University of British Columbia, TRIUMF laboratory and institutions in the US and the UK.

SNO uses ORION to facilitate high-speed communication for many initiatives including “Supernova Watch.” Under this program, SNO members will monitor events that could arise from neutrinos created in a supernova (a star collapsing through gravity) in our galaxy. In the case of such an event, a dozen scientists from around the world would receive a neutrino signal up to two hours before the light could be observed in telescopes. The team would then inspect the data on-site over the network and participate in a discussion of whether the astronomical community should be alerted. SNO’s response time for establishing this discussion is typically 10 minutes – and would be impossible without the high-speed connectivity provided by ORION.

The success of Supernova Watch and other underground experimental techniques was a major factor in the award of almost $40 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation in late 2003 to create a permanent, world-class facility for underground science research. The new SNOLAB facility will expand Canada’s capacity in the search for dark matter and will support greater understanding of the universe.

SNO Director, Art McDonald, Professor of Physics at Queen’s University, has been recognized worldwide for the team’s discoveries. Among other awards, Professor McDonald was named winner of the 2003 Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. As one of the driving forces for the Sudbury Neutrino Project, he helped to design and build the large underground experiment to reveal the ultimate truth about solar neutrinos. Physics Professor Clarence Virtue of Laurentian University is the SNO Networking and Computing Group Leader. With strong support from Sudbury’s Laurentian University, he has been singularly instrumental in ensuring that all the SNO partner institutions could take advantage of the latest available technologies including ORION.

Neutrinos have been the most elusive of the basic building blocks of nature. Thanks to SNO, we now know that neutrinos have mass, and are learning much more about their unusual properties. With SNO and SNOLAB, Canada has the lowest radioactivity experimental location in the world and is an international leader in the exciting new field of particle astrophysics.



For more information on SNO, visit their Web site at www.sno.phy.queensu.ca.

Hear a recent interview with Dr. McDonald on Planetary Radio, hosted by the Planetary Society, http://www.planetary.org/radio/show/00000187/

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