FOM archive's video: What physicists do with light: Dorothea Samtleben

In the FOM Annual Report 2014 physicists tell us about their research into light. You can read the interviews here (in Dutch): http://www.fom.nl/live/overfom/jaarverslagen/artikel.pag?objectnumber=292431&referpagina=14197 Who? Dorothea Samtleben completed her PhD in particle physics in Hamburg, Germany. She subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Chicago and Bonn. Since 2010 she works as a guest researcher at the National Institute for Subatomic Physics Nikhef. She teaches quantum physics and optics at the Leiden University. Transcript: 'I am Dorothea Sambtleben, data physicist. I want to use light to show signals from particles in space. We are astronomers really, so we work as physicists in astronomy. We don't use light to get information from the universe, but we use particles. And we call them neutrinos. They have specific characteristics that make then useful for this research. And we think that we can get more information from the distant universe than looking at light as astronomers do. In a supernova, much energy is in the form of neutrinos. Many other particles are scattered throughout the universe. If they're charged, you don't know where they're from. Photons are there too but extinguished. They won't penetrate a dense explosion with lots of material. But with neutrinos you get more information from a distance, and also information from very dense material. With KM3NET we hope, in the end, to start studying the field of neutrino astronomy. What I hope to achieve with light in my research is to make particles visible you wouldn't otherwise see. We'll put our detector where it is very dark, at the bottom of the Mediterranean. We'll look for photons using very light-sensitive detectors. Then we can visualise several photons and in that way show where particles went. In that way we can learn a lot about the universe, about the cosmic sources of neutrinos, which are possible in this universe.'