Neutrinos are interesting because they do not obey the rules. The Standard Model said they should be massless. According to Einstein, this means they necessarily travel at the speed of light--and, as a consequence, do not experience the flow of time. But in 1998 an experiment in Japan showed that neutrinos spontaneously transform between the three varieties of them that exist (known as electron, muon and tau neutrinos) as they zip through space--a process known as oscillation. Oscillation means neutrinos experience time. This, in turn, means they must travel slower than light and so have mass after all. That is a lever to break the Standard Model open. Steve Weinberg, a doyen of particle physics who was one of the Models architects, has described neutrino mass as the most important discovery in particle physics for a quarter of a century. But the details of oscillation remain incomplete, which is where Fermilabs neutrino beam comes in. By the end of July work should have finished on building NOVA, an experiment designed to pin those details down. The beam that passes through the white circle will carry on for 810km (500 miles) through the Earth to a detector in northern Minnesota. When it arrives, some of the muon neutrinos in it will have transformed themselves into electron neutrinos. NOVA will measure precisely how often this occurs. Read more: businessinsider/americas-contribution-to-a-new-generation-of-physics-2014-6#ixzz35zxAVrwG
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 04:14:18 +0000
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