Question: How do neutrinos interact with material and what effects can be used to detect them?

Pierre Lasorak answered on 18 Nov 2014:

Hi
They interact through what we call weak interaction. This is somewhat not very different from the electromagnetic interaction but much more weak (hence the name). Here weak means that the probability of interaction is very small. So we don’t see that much of neutrinos, in fact we only see a tiny part of them.
There is another interesting effect: When they interact, neutrinos tend to transform into another particle. So for example while interacting with an atom, a neutrino could turn into an electron that you can easily detect because it is charged.
In some more complex processes, the neutrino breaks the proton into pieces, and you observe a lot of particles coming from the same point in your detector. The way neutrino interact is very complex because to be sure to say how neutrinos interact, you need to observe a lot of interactions. And precisely neutrinos are not interacting a lot!