It felt like the Apollo control room seconds before the moon landing. For the approximately 60 physicists crowded into a conference room at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, on June 14, this was the moment of truth. After nearly a decade of work, the result of their painstaking search for one of the rarest radioactive decay processes in the universe — if it exists — was about to be revealed.
The hunting grounds were 15 kilograms of pure Germanium crystals kept in extreme isolation deep under a mountain in Italy. Members of the GERmanium Detector Array (GERDA) Collaboration had monitored electrical activity inside the crystals hoping to detect “neutrino-less double beta decay,” a spontaneous reshuffling of particles inside the nucleus of a Germanium-76 atom that would recast it as Selenium-76. The chemical decay could present a solution to one of the biggest mysteries in physics: why there is something rather than nothing in the universe.
Among the bedlam of electrical activity caused by other types of decays, detector noise and rogue radiation, the physicists expected their instruments to pick up two or three spikes of background noise closely resembling the spikes from neutrino-less double beta decay. But they needed a stronger signal — eight or 10 spikes — to be convinced that they had really detected it.
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