Ben Safdi (Princeton) gave the high-energy physics seminar today, about the possibility of detecting the cosmic neutrino background. The neutrinos are cold (like the CMB) and really, really hard to detect. Amazingly, there is a plan and a project underway. The idea is to find the neutrino-capture events that take a neutron to a proton; these have no energy threshold but in the electron output are kinematically unlike neutrino decays. The experiment requires a huge amount of tritium (in a crazy low-density foam-like setup), incredible energy resolution, and some luck. But it looks conceivably successful. In the afternoon, Chang Hoon Hahn (NYU) gave a nice candidacy presentation in which he showed a (preliminary) three-point function (bispectrum) from SDSS-III BOSS. It looks incredible.
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