The ghostly particles neutrino, discovered in the course of the experiment in Illinois, behave strangely, indicating the existence of additional neutrinos. If this is confirmed, we are waiting for revolution and the emergence of a new fundamental particle in the vocabulary of physics, which may even explain the mystery of dark matter. Despite the fact that nobody has yet said with full confidence about the positive results of the observations, this week in Germany at a conference on neutrinos, brought together experts and excitedly discussed the results and next steps.
A neutrino is something with something. Born long ago, in the first minutes of the Universe, and continues to appear in the hearts of stars and the cores of the reactors, these tiny particles move almost at the speed of light and do not interact; the billions of neutrinos pass through your body every day. Conventional particle neutrino can pass unharmed through a layer of lead a light year thick. Since opening in the mid-20th century it was predicted that neutrinos have no mass, but in the 1990’s, experiments showed that the mass of them is still there. But it is not known what. What is even more strange, they are found in three known types, or flavors — electron, muon and Tau neutrinos. And you can go from one flavor to another. Because of these and other oddities, many physicists concluded that neutrinos can open doors to new frontiers of physics.
And now the door finally succumbed. The discovery was revealed in data collected over 15 years experiment the Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment (MiniBooNE) at the National accelerator laboratory Fermi in Batavia, Illinois. MiniBooNE detects and characterizes neutrino by light flashes, they sometimes create, thumping into the atomic nucleus in a giant VAT filled with 800 tons of pure mineral oil. Its design is similar design in earlier project — LSND at Los Alamos national laboratory in new Mexico. In the 1990s, LSND observed a curious anomaly — more than you need, the number of electron neutrinos in the beam particle, which was originally submitted to the muon neutrino; MiniBooNE saw the same thing now.
Since the muon neutrinos could be transformed directly into electronic scent at a short distance from the LSND experiment, theorists have suggested at the time that some of the particles oscillate in the fourth fragrance “sterile” neutrino, and then into electron neutrinos, producing a mysterious surge. Many believed that the results are random and caused by some error specific to LSND. But MiniBooNE observed the same picture and now, scientists have to try to explain this coincidence.
“Now we have to accept that both experiments have observed single physical effect, so it must be something happening fundamentally,” said MiniBooNE Richard van de water of Los Alamos. “Ignore no more work.”
The fourth type of neutrino really exists. Confirmation is not far off
Ilya Hel