Borexino retires, the great neutrino hunter who from the bowels of the Gran Sasso has revealed many of the secrets contained in the 'heart' of the Sun and the Earth.
Once the process of removing all the hydrocarbons present in the apparatus has been completed, the curtain falls definitively on the important scientific experiment launched in 2007 in the Gran Sasso National Laboratories (Lngs) of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn).
In 14 years of data taking, Borexino has achieved first-rate scientific results.
"Among the main ones - explains the Infn - we remember, in 2014, the revelation of the neutrinos produced in the proton-proton nuclear reaction, the one that produces 99% of the Sun's energy, and in 2020 the first observation of neutrinos coming from one of the main cycles that occur in the center of the Sun: the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle ".
Both of these discoveries led Borexino into the Top Ten of the most important physics achievements by the international journal Physics World.
The experiment also won important international prizes, including the Cocconi Prize awarded by the European Physics Society.
Of considerable importance is the contribution that Borexino has also given to geophysics:
After the emptying of the liquid scintillator, the disposal operations of Borexino now continue with the removal of the ultrapure water contained within the shield, which allowed to isolate the scintillator present in the central sphere from interference produced by external contamination.
Subsequently Borexino will be partly dismantled and partly adapted to make the area available for other future experiments based on new cryogenic technologies that no longer involve the use of hydrocarbons.
