Noboru Furuta was standing outside a room above the giant Super-Kamiokande detector when he felt a gust of wind. The vinyl flaps covering the doorway behind him blew apart in the breeze. Gurgling and clanging noises filled the air. "All these sounds were mixed together," says Furuta, a technician at Super-K, as the detector is known. "I'd never heard anything like it." The furore picked up pace, like popcorn popping, before coming to an abrupt halt. Furuta didn't know it, but a shock wave had just ripped through the detector - a huge cylindrical tank filled with 50 million litres of ultra-pure water and lined by some 11, 000 light-sensitive sensors. More than half of the sensors had been smashed. In less than 10 seconds, one of the past decade's most significant physics experiments had been reduced to tatters. Situated in a disused mine below Mount Ikena, 240 kilometres northwest of Tokyo, Super-K was designed to look for elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos. Collisions between neutrinos and water molecules in the detector's tank produce characteristic flashes of light that are captured by sensitive photomultiplier tubes. The layers of rock above the detector serve to screen out other particles that could produce similar flashes.
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