What do more knowing astro thinkers think of this? Is there an unlocated neutrino or is it yust a phenomena? And if there is one wherePlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! should we look, or more correctly how should we look. Free to comment>>>>>> -------------------------------------quote------------------------------------- Tue Dec 11 16:09:54 2001 Pacific Time New Type of Neutrino May Exist, Scientists Say SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Dec. 11 (AScribe Newswire) -- A collaboration of university scientists and researchers working at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico has published a final result paper that describes controversial research regarding neutrinos. Neutrinos are particles that rain down and pass through us from the sun and cosmic rays, in numbers of billions per second. They make up a small part of the "dark matter" of the universe. David Caldwell, research professor of physics, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is a member of the group of researchers, said that if these latest results are right "they will shake up a lot of things." The existence of neutrinos was first postulated 70 years ago by Wolfgang Pauli, and ever since then the physics world has been trying to find and analyze them. This latest experiment, published in the Physical Review, earlier this month, has results requiring a fourth type of neutrino, the sterile neutrino, which, according to Caldwell makes many physicists uncomfortable since it is impossible to detect directly, and very difficult to understand theoretically. Caldwell explained that the article reports on results of an experiment that ran from 1993-1998. Data were collected from the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center accelerator, an intense source of low energy neutrinos. The Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) is a tank viewed by 1220 photo-multipliers and filled with 167 tons of baby oil. In the baby oil is dissolved 14 pounds of an organic scintillator so as to produce two kinds of light by which to identify charged particles produced in the tank by neutrino interactions. While the three known types of neutrinos (designated electron, mu, and tau) have extremely weak interactions -- in other words it is very rare that they knock into other particles - the sterile neutrino would have essentially no interactions at all. Electron neutrinos from the sun do not reach the Earth in the number expected, and it is now rather clear that this is because they change into another type of neutrino. Similarly, observation of mu neutrinos produced in our atmosphere also show conversion or oscillation to another kind of neutrino. It was first thought that neutrinos must be without mass, but given oscillation, they must have mass, like the electron and unlike photons which are without mass. Caldwell went on to say that the oscillation observations actually measure the difference in mass between the initial neutrino and the one into which it converts. The problem is that those mass differences are quite different in the three cases: solar, atmospheric, and LSND. With three neutrino masses there can be only two independent mass differences. A fourth neutrino is required, yet other measurements show there can be only three having the normal weak interactions, hence the peculiar sterile neutrino. Such new phenomena would have an enormous impact on the standard model of particle physics and would have very broad implications for future research in the fields of nuclear physics, high-energy physics, and astrophysics. -30- AScribe - The Public Interest Newswire / 510-653-9400 www.ascribe.org -------------------------------------quote-------------------------------------
It would definitly shock what we know now about elementary particles. The existance of a fourth neutrino would (from what we understand now from elementary particles) imply the existance of an electron/muon/tau like particle and two new quarks. Heavy Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Bye! Crisp
Ah, hell. And up to now I've been putting my money on my patent application for the Neutrino Flashlight.
There is another news about neutrinos which may change our view about them: ___________________________________________________ Neutrinos feel the force The orthodox worldview of fundamental physics is challenged by new experiments. 27 November 2001 PHILIP BALL Fermilab's collider shakes Standard Model ?Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy If big cracks start with little flaws, then physicists have reason to feel nervous. A tiny discrepancy between theory and experiment identified in measurements of two ghostly particles may reveal hitherto unsuspected particles or forces in fundamental physics. In the meantime, the finding challenges the current description of the subatomic world, called the Standard Model. Physicists working at Fermilab, near Chicago, used the Tevatron particle accelerator to fire a stream of subatomic particles called neutrinos at the nuclei of atoms to see how they interact. Their results indicate that the strength of attraction between neutrinos and particles called Z bosons is about 2 percent larger than predicted by calculations based on the Standard Model1. This doesn't sound like a big difference, but the accuracy of the results means there is a good chance the difference is real - not just a measurement error - and implies that the Standard Model cannot be wholly correct. If true, it won't be the first time physicists have heard that their cherished Standard Model needs revising. There have been earlier, tentative hints from high-energy physics experiments that the model is not the last word. Indeed, many physicists feel quietly confident that the Standard Model will be replaced before long with some better theory such as 'supersymmetry', which predicts a whole slew of as-yet unobserved new particles. The Standard Model, first developed in the 1960s, explains the classes, properties and behaviour of nearly all the fundamental particles and forces yet known. It provides a description of three of the four forces: electromagnetism and the strong and weak forces that operate over very short distances in atomic nuclei. According to this description, electromagnetism and the weak force both sprung from a single 'electroweak' force in the first instants of the Big Bang. Physicists hope one day to 'unify' the electroweak and strong forces in the same way, and then ultimately to find a common origin of forces that incorporates the fourth force-gravity. The experiment, called NuTeV, is designed to probe the electroweak force by bouncing neutrinos off quarks, the particles that make up protons and neutrons in ordinary atoms. Ocasionally, neutrinos and quarks interact through the weak force by passing a W or a Z boson -the carriers of the weak force - between them. The NuTeV team found that the numbers of W and Z bosons produced differed from what the Standard Model predicts. There are several tantalizing explanations for the difference: neutrinos might feel a new, unknown force; there is a new heavyweight Z boson; or there might exist another new particle called a leptoquark, which can transform quarks into other fundamental particles. While each of these possibilities would represent a dramatic new finding, the first priority will be to confirm the NuTeV results in a different experiment.
