Particle Physics: Neutrino

Interesting sometimes how life works out. Just as we are about to study random topics in class with many things coming back to the neutrino, I run across an article in WIRED science about it:  Strange Effects: The Mystifying History of Neutrino Experiments. Again having only a slight knowledge of some of these words I dove into the article to see what I could learn and boy was I ignorant. 


A friend of mine once told me, after a rant that I wanted to be in the field of astronomy, that I would need to know some particle physics. Thinking I knew better (don't all freshmen!?!) I blew off the advice and never perused taking the class. Now I have come to find that it is impossible to take as no professor has taught it in the last 2 years at UCR. So I guess this article, with respect to the neutrino, is the best I am going to get. 

Here's what I learned:

1.          In terms of numbers, there are A LOT of neutrinos. For every 1 proton or electron there is at least one billion neutrinos. Or this analogy:  Look at the nail on your pinky finger: Every second, about 65 billion neutrinos pass through it. Almost all were produced inside the giant nuclear reactor in our sun's belly. You would think with numbers like that we would know just about everything about them. But this leads me to my second discovery... 

2.         We know almost jack shit about them and jack just left town. Why? Well they are the priss particles of the universe. They barley interact with matter and have nothing that turns them on aka no charge. No wonder Frederick Reines would win the Noble in 1995 for the discovery. They are involved in many different processes: Beta Decay, nuclear reactors, gamma radiation, our sun, other suns, and causing problems with other experiments such as looking for proton decay. 

         In 2001, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada detected all three types of neutrinos

         coming from the sun, helping solve the solar neutrino problem. (Roy Kaltschmidt/Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) 

3.         There are three types of neutrinos: the electron neutrino that is the one that is produced in the sun or from the nuclear reactors and muon or tau neutrinos that are involved in all other processes such as when they are inbound to Earth from the sun. The types of neutrino found is based on the distance it has traveled from the source. LSND has possibly found a fourth type of neutrino but that has not been confirmed.  

A physicist sits inside the LSND detector. (Los Alamos National Laboratory) 

And there are many future experiments that will hopefully shed more photons on the situation. It seems every time they get closer and closer to an answer more questions arise. But this is why we do science!