Ghosts of the quantum world, neutrinos interact so weakly with ordinary matter that it would take a wall of solid lead five light-years deep to stop the neutrinos generated by the Sunday.
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Neutrinos are the second most abundant particles in the universe after photons, “so any property of neutrinos can have dramatic repercussions on the life of the universe and on its evolution”, he said.
The flavor sensitivity arises because when a neutrino of any flavor reacts with a deuteron, it can produce a proton and a neutron. An area of the mine was filled with a hundred thousand gallons of cleaning fluid. “Not all of the beam hits that detector, but it will see something like one neutrino interaction per day”.
The current week’s declaration of Canadian Dr. Arthur McDonald’s Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on neutrinos is an incredible help for Canadian science. How do they interact with antimatter? We call the matter we don’t see dark matter.
Neutrinos are minuscule particles created in nuclear reactions, such as in the sun and the stars.
At age 72, Arthur McDonald said winning the Nobel Prize brought him back many years.
Hence, the solar neutrino problem was solved. For a long time, neutrinos were considered to be massless. The name was suggested by Italian Enrico Fermi, who thought of the neutrino as a “piccolo neutron”, a small neutron, with no electric charge. This is one aspect that they will investigate at INO.
McDonald’s research has focused on neutrinos – a fundamental particle that scientists previously believed held no mass. The “oscillation” comes in thanks to quantum mechanics.
Theoretical physicist Matt Strassler explains why there is more than one way to classify neutrinos. Instead, it changes as time passes.
In principle, atmospheric neutrinos of 5 GeV and higher that arrive at a detector directly beneath them preserve their original muon-to-electron ratio of 2:1. In the nineteen-eighties, my colleague Sheldon Glashow and I coined the phrase “just-so neutrino oscillations” to describe this process.
At SNO a 12-meter-diameter acrylic sphere containing 1000 tons of D2O was monitored by 9500 photomultiplier tubes. When the neutrinos strike a heavy water atom, a spark is produced, called Cherenkov radiation. This suggested that electron neutrinos can, in fact, oscillate into other neutrinos.
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Michael Turner, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, who knows both laureates, said, “neutrinos attract a special kind of person”. In one case, the number of neutrinos produced in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays did not agree with predictions. However, the muon-neutrinos that came straight down to Super-Kamiokande were more numerous than those that had passed through the planet. In the early 1990s Kamiokande-Super-Kamiokande’s smaller and less sensitive predecessor-and other experiments had measured a ratio of muon neutrions to electron neutrinos that was closer to 1:1 than to 2:1. The occasion also should prompt politicians and education officials in particular to consider whether their policies are conducive to strengthening the foundation for scientific research in Japan and make changes if they’re not. This suggested that electron neutrinos can, in fact, oscillate into other neutrinos. The reason is simple. The SNO Collaboration made the key measurements by observing neutrinos from the Sunday. So where is neutrino research heading next – and what could it discover? “It’s the first bit of the Standard Model as it was originally written down that doesn’t work”. There is new physics remaining to be discovered, perhaps at the Large Hadron Collider, or by means of another machine that has yet to be built. They have shown that there is much more matter in the universe than we can directly observe. Another possibility is that we’ll get to the core. We don’t know which future we will live in. The achievement underlines the need for India to set up a neutrino observatory. There are still fundamental mysteries to be resolved.
