Discovery Monday - 'The hunt for the phantom particles: sending neutrinos through the Alps'

Each second, billions of neutrinos bombard every square centimetre of the Earth's surface and therefore pass through our bodies, without us realising it. These phantom particles only rarely interact with matter. They provide physicists with much food for thought, as they are difficult to 'catch' in detectors.
Neutrinos are all the more elusive as they are capable of metamorphosis. There are in fact three types of neutrino, the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino, and each can mutate into the other. In 2006 CERN will send a beam of muon neutrinos through the Earth's crust to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (Italy) some 730 kilometres away, in order to better understand the metamorphoses which the neutrino undergoes.
At the next Discovery Monday, light will be shed on the path that these intriguing particles will take to Gran Sasso. You will also learn about the methods physicists use to try and catch them in order to prove that they have a mass.
In addition, you will be able to see the remains of Gargamelle and the BEBC, CERN's most famous bubble chambers, in the garden of the Microcosm. You'll be given an insight into how physicists were able to infer the existence of neutrino interactions in these detectors using photographs.