'It's like Christmas shopping at the specialist bou-I tiques,' says Phil Adamson, as he describes his recent I US$250,000 buying spree. Adamson, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Bata-via, Illinois, leads a team that has spent the past few months acquiring and installing three ultra-high-precision atomic clocks; six Global Positioning System receivers; more than a kilometre of optic fibre; two auxiliary detectors and at least one pair of timing-interval counters ("kind of fancy stopclocks", he says) - all to time subatomic neutrinos with nanosecond precision as they pass through the detectors of Fermilab's Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS).
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