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Posted on 02/29/2016 7:00:49 PM PST by MtnClimber
In tunnels deep inside a granite mountain at Daya Bay, a nuclear reactor facility some 55 kilometers from Hong Kong, sensitive detectors are hinting at the existence of a new form of neutrino, one of nature's most ghostly and abundant elementary particles.
Neutrinos, electrically neutral particles that sense only gravity and the weak nuclear force, interact so feebly with matter that 100 trillion zip unimpeded through your body every second. They come in three known types: electron, muon and tau. The Daya Bay results suggest the possibility that a fourth, even more ghostly type of neutrino exists - one more than physicists' standard theory allows.
Dubbed the sterile neutrino, this phantom particle would carry no charge of any kind and would be impervious to all forces other than gravity. Only when shedding its invisibility cloak by transforming into an electron, muon or tau neutrino could the sterile neutrino be detected. Definitive evidence "would open up a whole new avenue of research," says particle physicist Stephen Parke of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.
Possible evidence for the sterile particle comes from a mismatch between theory and experiment. If a nuclear reactor produces a beam of just one type of neutrino, theory predicts that some should change their identity as they travel to a far-off detector (SN Online: 10/6/15). Analyzing more than 300,000 electron antineutrinos (the antimatter counterpart of the electron neutrino) collected from the Daya Bay nuclear reactors during 217 days of operation, researchers found 6 percent fewer of the particles than predicted by the standard particle physics model. Particle physicist Kam-Biu Luk of the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and colleagues report the findings in the Feb. 12 Physical Review Letters.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Seems nutrinos can pass through vast amounts of matter without collisions. Makes detection very difficult.
BTTT
My head hurts. Who do I sue?
A sterile neutrino?
Answerable to no one except gravity
But only if or when a little coupling occurs
Wow. Very interesting.
A new twist indeed.
Like does darkmatterreallymatter..
Or sumthin’.
What are they gonna call it? The Zeppo neutrino? The Shemp neutrino? The Stuart Sutcliffe neutrino?
CC
I would call it the Zer0 nutrino in respect for our dear leader ZER0 who seems to do nothing too.
My unpublished work in my head has confirmed this.
A sterile Rubio?
The bright side is- neutrino collision insurance is very cheap.
The Jeb neutrino...or the Gilmore neutrino.
Low energy neutrino?
Hast hit it, Friend Wiggle.
TO quote that great scientific mind, Hillary Clinton, “At this point, what MATTER does it make”?
Did I just write that? What’s the MATTER with me? Too many Neutrinos running around my brain, I think.
As sterile neutrinos have low mass and might interact in neutrino oscillations at low energies, this looks promising, but just 3 sigma is not enough. It should be 5, as this is hard science not sociology or medical research.
But, there are many theories about sterile neutrinos, and some observations:
http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+EXACT+Sterile_neutrino/0/1/0/all/0/1
Only experiments will exclude the bad ones, although many elegant theories will stay alive too long.
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