Posted on 08/07/2015 11:20:05 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Neutrinos are unimaginably numerous, but their infrequent interaction with matter make the particles a challenge to study. Neutrinos exist in three “flavors:” muon, electron and tau. The NOvA experiment aims to investigate one of the peculiar properties of neutrinos — their tendency to change flavors, or oscillate. NOvA is what the physicists call a long-baseline experiment, as the neutrinos travel more than 500 miles underground.
“We make a beam of muon-type neutrinos at Fermilab, and then we detect those at Ash River, Minnesota,” Vahle explained. “We are looking for muon-type neutrinos to change into electron-type neutrinos. We also look for those muon neutrinos to just disappear, or really change into any type of neutrino.”
The results verify that NOvA is picking up neutrinos that have oscillated. She said that the physicists had determined that if no muon neutrinos were oscillating between the beam source and Ash River, the far detector would pick up a single background oscillation event from the beam.
“If this muon-to-electron oscillation is not occurring, we would see one event in the far detector, OK?,” Vahle said. “It turns out, for the primary analysis, we see six events.”
She went on to explain that the secondary analysis, essentially a cross check of the muon-to-electron oscillation, showed an even greater excess over background.
Nelson said that a comprehensive understanding of the complex behavior of neutrinos could shed light on some of the most fundamental questions of cosmology.
“One of the big questions of the universe is this: Why is there matter?” Nelson said. “Why is there stuff? Matter and antimatter could have just annihilated and we’d be left with nothing in the universe but energy. If the answer isn’t in neutrinos, it’s something really exotic.”
(Excerpt) Read more at wm.edu ...
String Theory (I think) ping
As Heidegger said, “Why is there anything and not much rather nothing?” There, I’ve now saved you the trouble of reading Heidegger.
Sporting wood! /s
“I’ve now saved you the trouble of reading Heidegger.”
And like all of those existentialists, he never gets around to providing an answer, does he?
Well...is that where he left it?
“first NOvA neutrino results”
My first car was a 74 Nova. 350 engine only; but that car could move.
I didn’t have neutrino’s on mine; but it would still go 120 on the open road.
Keep finding particles. Maybe some day you’ll find the last particle and announce that you’ve answered the ultimate question of the universe.
< /s>
“One of the big questions of the universe is this: Why is there matter?” Nelson said. “Why is there stuff? Matter and antimatter could have just annihilated and we’d be left with nothing in the universe but energy. If the answer isn’t in neutrinos, it’s something really exotic.”
Is there matter, what’s the matter and why does it matter?
Just the other day, I was classifying non-nilpotent complex structures on 6-nilmanifolds and their associated invariant balanced metrics. Within this application I was finding a large family of solutions of the heterotic supersymmetry equations with non-zero flux, non-flat instanton and constant dilaton satisfying the anomaly cancellation condition with respect to the Chern connection.
Now, these were differentiable manifolds which have a transitive nilpotent group of diffeomorphisms acting on them. Typical example of a homogeneous space and obviously diffeomorphic to the quotient space N/H, the quotient of a nilpotent Lie group N modulo a closed subgroup H.
But I digress. As Hillary would say, “What difference does it make?”
Thanks BL, will ping later.
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