Nobel-Winning 'Ghost Particle' Detector To Be Repointed At Disgruntled Dead Physicists
After honoring neutrino research, the prize committee says the underground array is uniquely suited to tracking down spirits with unresolved citation disputes.
Fresh off awarding its physics prize for work detecting neutrinos — nicknamed "ghost particles" for how rarely they interact with matter — the Nobel committee confirmed it is exploring a second use for the same observatory: locating the literal ghosts of scientists who believe they were passed over.
The detector, an array of sensors buried deep in ice, was built to catch fleeting signals from distant cosmic events. Committee officials say early tests have already picked up what they describe as "a lot of very cold sighing."
"We came for the neutrinos, we stayed for the grudges," said a committee spokesperson, who declined to specify which decades of winners-that-weren't were generating the strongest readings. "The ice remembers everything."
Researchers caution the hauntings cannot be confirmed with the same rigor as the neutrino work, since ghosts, unlike particles, tend to interrupt data collection to ask who got the medal instead.
Still, the observatory's operators say repurposing existing equipment is more efficient than building a new instrument from scratch, and that any stray apparitions picked up along the way will be filed as a bonus discovery rather than a distraction from the mission.