What Does your Desktop look like?

D'oh! Missed that one! Egg, meet chin

 

what does it do? and why are they in a boat?

 

Funnley enough it detects neutrinos, and by the looks of things there in a pool

 

Yeah I'm not entirely sure how it's supposed to work, but I do remember that it is essential that the water is as pure as humanly possible. That whole pool is filled with triple distilled water, and it's something like five times clearer than 'clean' tapwater - i.e. light penetrates five times deeper

 

don't suppose you've got a link to that wallpaper have you ? 1280x1024 prefered but i'll take anything because it looks so damn good.

 

This: http://www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/ should pretty much answer all your questions in more detail than you'd care to go into. Sorry to go OT

 

Nevermind... it was already answered

 

Indeed:

It's not for making pure water, it just requires incredibly pure water to get accurate readings of neutrino interactions

 

Photos of super-kamiokande available here:

http://www-sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/doc/sk/photo/high.html

 

my latest :

 

May i ask what youve blocked out in the top left?

 

Nothings blocked out. He's just using a smaller resolution on the second screen, so windows just shows the gap as black space.

 

Yea, I know that now. Previously, I thought it was a chamber for distilling the water, but the website the information was taken from was pretty vague.

 

You could also use heavy water.... apparently

 

Don't even want to think about how long it would take to collect that much heavy water!

(Heavy water, for those that don't know, is water made with deuterium or tritium instead of regular Hydrogen. These are radioactive isotopes of Hydrogen with, respectively, one or two extra neutrons in the core, making it heavier while chemically it's still H20)

 

Whered'ya get the wallpaper?

 

Hosting it for a bit would be very nice death_star Like it very much too

 

wow! i hadnt expected quite as much interest!

yes, to all those who realised (both before and after my post ) it is a neutrino detector.

nice link atomic! although i actuall got the pic from here, that site is great and has fairly understandable information about the Super-K detector/ neutrinos.
They are in the boat because the are servicing the Photmultiplier tubes (PMTs) (which convert a low number of photons, ie very dim light, into an electrical current). The neutrinos (occasionally) interact with the pure water inside the detector and produce a relativistic (FAST!) electron, which causes soemthing called Cherenkov radiation (it 'emits' light). This is what the PMTs detect, and you can tell there has been a neutrino event.
Thats somewhat oversimplified, but about right

RoB

 

I wonder what death_star blanked out...

 

An image I came across while I was busy developing photos at work, couldn't help myself but to make another copy of it