From the UD forum, by Stephen...
"The experiment is called the Neutrino Factory, scheduled for construction some time around 2015. Its primary aim is to fire beams of neutrinos (fundamental particles) through the Earth's interior to detector stations on different continents. They're doing this to measure whether they change type en route (there are 3 types of neutrino) and data from this in turn will allow them to determine the neutrino's mass (and whether it even has mass).
The reason they want to do this is that the neutrino is just about the most common particle in the universe (billions pass through your body every second) and if it has mass, this could cause the universe to eventually recollapse on itself. Knowing the mass will also allow scientists to make better models of how the universe began.
Actually the machine that's being built (costing at least $1.9bn) has several scientific aims. The neutrinos are used for fundamental physics experiments, but the proton beam that is produced at the start (this hits the target rod at the beginning of the simulation you downloaded) is also going to be used in experiments for neutralising radioactive waste by transmuting the radioactive elements into stable ones.
You are simulating the part of the process where the protons hit a target rod and cause pions to be emitted, which decay into muons, which then proceed to a storage ring and decay into electrons and neutrinos. This is a fairly critical part of the apparatus, which catches the pions and confines some of them into a beam while they decay into muons. The efficiency of this dictates that of the entire machine. If the R&D says it isn't efficient enough it may not get funded to be built, but users of this program have already doubled the estimated efficiency, so it probably will.
Hope this helps explain stuff."
Facebook
Twitter