Thursday, May 20, 2021

Which neutrino is the heaviest?

Amazing stuff! Mysterious neutrinos! Nothing neutral about neutrinos (no pun intended)! 😄 

"Neutrinos are the featherweights of the subatomic world. These extremely plentiful, rarely interacting particles are at least 500,000 times lighter than electrons. They are produced in the sun, in exploding stars, and in decay processes on Earth—even ones in your own body. But they interact so infrequently with other matter that you’d hardly know there are so many of them around. ...
For decades physicists thought these ghostly particles were massless. But experiments revealed that neutrinos do have mass. In fact, there are three types of neutrinos and three different masses. ...
Scientists have yet to measure the exact value of any of these masses. But even finding out which neutrino is the heaviest would be a huge leap in our understanding of both neutrinos and the physics that govern our universe. ... known as the “neutrino mass hierarchy” or “neutrino mass ordering.” ...
Also, since neutrinos have no electric charge, they could theoretically be their own antimatter particles. ...
In pursuit of an answer to the neutrino hierarchy question, the NOvA experiment sends beams of neutrinos and antineutrinos about 500 miles from Fermilab in Illinois to a detector in Ash River, Minnesota. The T2K experiment sends them about 190 miles from J-PARC in Tokai, Japan, to a detector under Mount Ikeno.

Scientists at the experiments compare the rate of neutrino oscillations to the rate of antineutrino oscillations. Any differences between them could help scientists figure out what’s going on with neutrino masses. ..."

Which neutrino is the heaviest? | symmetry magazine

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