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First Direct Evidence Of Tau Neutrino
leb writes: "An international collaboration of scientists at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will announce on Friday, July 21, the first direct evidence for the subatomic particle called the tau neutrino, the third kind of neutrino known to particle physicists. This site has extensive coverage of the event with pictures and related material. The new direct evidence for the tau neutrino is far from closing the chapter on neutrino physics. Scientists are eager to learn whether neutrinos have mass, a
result that would put a crack in the Standard Model, leading to major changes in our picture of the evolution of the universe." The site has some great explanatory diagrams to boot.
Actually, I pronounce it 'taw', undoubtedly because my first physics professor pronounced it that way (maybe it's because he's British?). Merriam-Webster at least agrees that there are two ways to pronounce tau, but neither of them come anywhere near close the pronunciation of tao. So I guess this whole post is pointless. Such is the life of Slashdot I guess.
My humblest apologies for not spelling the ENGLISH term for the Great Wall of China right:P
completely off topic here, but:
It was built to impress potential invaders- and smugglers, not to keep them out. Ofcourse, logistically it was impossible to stop an invading force from going over it (it's not that high, few hours work to kill the guards on one or two towers, pile up some dirst against the wall and go right over it with your army) or around it (it's no one unbroken wall around china, rather a series of walls with gaps inbetween). And by the way, it didn't stop the invaders. They weren't impressed, and went straight over/around it.
Just to be anal retentive, you don't prove anything in science, either. You can _disprove_ things, but really what you are disproving is some theory which then needs to be revised.
The only discipline where you actually prove things is mathematics, and even then you have to make a bunch of assumptions first.
Here's a good God experiment: climb up a tall tower. Stand at the top, and shout "God, if you really exist, save me from death and I'll believe in you." Then hurl yourself from the tower.
This will prove that God doesn't like pushy mortals. ^_^
The enemies of Democracy are
Back in the 1960s?, similar questions were raised over the building of SLAC. What possible real use would a two-mile-long linear accelerator be? Of course, once the things were built, it became clear that you could use highly-polarized synchroton radiation for fundamental crystal studies, for materials engineering (about as practical as one can get, in terms of research areas), and biomedical studies. These were not foreseen, but they've become really important.
Not everything is going to be electrons and protons under "normal" conditions forever and ever amen. A lot of the 21st century will be breaking the dumb-monkey mold and designing things because we understand them for once. Current understandings of superconductivity, for example, are intimately tied to the Standard Model and the field theory it enshrines. If the SM is replaced, one can imagine -- and I, for one, would be willing to bet -- that it will impact that and other materials field.
A focus on the "practical" is a guarantee that further progress will end -- in basic knowledge, in human scientific endeavour, and in applied technology. Sagan illustrates this nicely in The Demon-Haunted World. In the 1860s, Queen Victoria (he says) could never, despite her power and the wealth of the British Empire, have commanded the invention of a wireless broadcast technology. Yet a social outcast, pursuing his own interests (Maxwell) laid the foundations for the entire telecommunications revolution that we like to preach about. Directed research would never have produced the same results as serendipity, becuase we would never have asked the right questions.
So this probably will be useful for applications someday, in some way. And I'll just leave out the higher, ennobling ends of science. If I have to discuss them, you probably wouldn't understand them anyway.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Is THAT what Cerenkov radiation is? I remember reading the Star Trek Technical Manual and tripping over some mention of "Cerenkov radiation" when a ship came out of warp. Just another example of how closely those technical advisors stick to true science :)
Does anyone know what Cerenkov radiation itself is? Is it EM, or beta particles, or what?
+++ATH0
"Donuts... is there anything they can't do?"
-Homer Simpson, the best mono-thingy-guy there ever was.
Particle physics is really simple once you can get past the part where everything is made of smaller pieces. If you want to read something that completely blows the Standard Model out of the water, then you should read the book Hyperspace, by Michio Kaku It is about theoretical physics and talks about really cool stuff like higher dimensions wormholes, and relativity.
If you just want to stick to particle physics then you can check out CERN
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
This is a very short-sighted and narrow attitude
to take; Unfortunately, it seems to be a popular
one here in the good Ol' US of A. Basic Science
should not be subjected to considerations of
usefulness and practicality. I highly doubt that
Planck, Einstein, Bohr and all the other early
investigators of the quantum realm were seeking a
new way to cook food, but we somehow ended up
with the microwave anyway.
As to the "explain anything" criteria: What do
you think all this is about? Understanding matter
and energy at a fundamental level is the only way
we are going to be able "explain anything". Like
anything else worth doing, it's going to take
time and money.
In the meantime, those seeking a "practical"
use should meditate on the usefulness of
manufacturing those crappy little toys at the
bottom of their "Jack In a Box" packages.
Thomas S. Howard
It requires the cosmological parameters to be some way and a curved space in some way. Pretty dead theory too.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Well, I was close enough for a biologist! But how about the calorimetric determination of mass? HomeySmurf seems to know what he's talking about but can you really get a significant temperature measurement of a neutrino hitting an abandoned mine full of water? Would one of the other physicists like to comment?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Yes neutrinos (baryons) are RH and anti-neutrinos (anti-baryons) are LH, guess my parenthesis is not so clear but at least it's in the right (pun intended) order!
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
No, it's basically, dumbass.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Better yet -- Is the abandoned mine idea serious? I mean, one would think (Comp Sci student with an interest in Quantum Physics here) that one would try to use the absolute most controlled environment one could get to measure the tiny temperature increase. And even if you had a perfectly controlled test area, there would be SOME deviation that would affect the tests. How could you prove that it was the neutrino and not something else?
Their experiment is *not* an academic exercise of adding a few more digits to an existing measurement. It is the conclusive discovery of a particle whose existence was implied by mathematical symmetries. It's easy to say "yeah, we expected it", but consider that conclusive failure to detect the tau neutrino would have been utterly astonishing, and would have turned all of theoretical physics inside out. If the Standard Model is wrong at high energies, it is also wrong at room temperature, and you would suspect the existence of undiscovered interesting (and useful) phenomena at room temperature.
And photons. And whatever it is that causes gravity (which, BTW, is unexplained by the Standard Model). You ignore nuclear engineers, whose work is strongly and directly affected by quarks, gluons, and color charge. Not to mention the people who will be cleaning up after nuke engineers, possibly using particle beam transmuters.
And I'd wager that spacecraft engineers are rather concerned about where cosmic rays come from, what they do when they hit ordinary matter, and how likely they are. When a fully-ionized iron nucleus with the kinetic energy of a rifle bullet shows up, high energy physics suddenly seems rather relevant.
This conveniently ignores the many uses of radioactive compounds (such as the radioactive tracers used for DNA analysis, metabolism studies, and PET scanners). These compounds are not made in billion-dollar government labs or giant reactors -- they are custom transmuted by privately owned particle accelerators in ordinary office buildings. If that's not good enough for you, how about the manufacture of radioactive cobalt for sterilizing food.
Have you ever heard of gamma ray bursts (GRBs)? Do a web search if you haven't. These things can reach halfway across the universe and ionize the Earth's atmostphere as much as the sun normally does. If we were caught in the beam of a nearby GRB, we'd be toast.
Have you heard of the solar neutrino problem? Neutrino measurements show that either the sun is going out, or that we don't understand basic physics very well. Don't know about you, but I consider Sol pretty relevant to my life.
Finally, much political power rests on mastery of nuclear power. Fast breeder reactors create strife, and military might rests in large part on nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. What do those things have in common? They're all bright neutrino sources. Discovery of a sensitive neutrino detector would give the discovering nation tremendous power. They could monitor the power levels and reaction spectra of the enemy's weapons reactors and thus tell roughly how much plutonium was being produced. And they could track all the world's submarines. A good neutrino detector would change the world as much as ICBMs did. Of course, it is likely impossible, but remember that respectable scientists once pooh-poohed nuclear power the same way.
I'm not saying we'll all put neutrino ovens in the kitchen in five years, but that doesn't mean that the research is worthless and good only for keeping scientists off the streets.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
But what can we do armed with knowledge of subatomic particles?
Will beams of Tau Nutrinos be usefull?
Actually this brings up an interesting point. Would it be at all possible to use neutrinos to slice bread? I'm going on the presumption that not having to sharpen your knife outweighs all possible disadvantages.
Because neutrino oscillation (which there is strong evidence for thanks to the efforts of the Super-Kamiokande team) requires that neutrinos have mass; unfortunately, the manner in which they change types may require (mathematically speaking of course) another type of neutrino. Now this clearly will require a modification to the Standard Model, which originally only postulated the existence of 3 neutrinos to match the three lepton types (disregarding anti-particles of course).
:wq
Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
This detector is designed to answer the "solar neutrino problem", namely that we keep detecting half as many neutrinos as we should be from the sun. Where did the other half go? One theory is that neutrinos oscillate between types. I.e. a muon neutrino oscillates into a tau neutrino as it travels to the earth. The new form of neutrino is then not detected because the original detectors only detected muon neutrinos. SNO will be able to detect both types and distinguish between them, so it should be able to convincingly answer the question of the missing neutrinos.
nojw
When's it gonna appear in a Star Trek movie? Captain! We've got to reverse the Tau Neutrino flow through the warp transducers!
"I live in a world of make-believe, with faeries and leprechauns and tiny little frogs with funny hats."
This is great news for particle physics. Hopefully the discovery of predicted tau neutrino will show Congress that particle physics is still making discoveries, and therefore fund it.
As for the comment on the standard model breaking down, it broke down when Feinman was still alive and doing major work. The introduction of the Higgs Field heralded this breaking.
One problem with the standard model is that it doesn't account for the masses of the particles by itself. A graduate student, Higgs, predicted that there was a particle that emenated a "mass field", this was dubbed the Higgs Field particle. This fixed up many of the complications mathematically, but created its own problems. If one uses the standard model to predict the mass of the Higgs Field particle it diverges (heads towards infinity) which is unphysical. There are theories like supersymmetry that are being introduced to fix these problems with the standard model.
Other interesting things that can occur now that the Tau Neutrino has been discovered more research on figuring out whether or not neutrinos have mass will become easier. The basic premis behind the test is that the group over at Fermilab will send mu-neutrinos, or now tau-neutrinos, down a long tunnel. If the the mu-neutrinos, or tau-neutrinos, deteriorate into electron-neutrinos or change polarization, then we know that they have mass. Knowing whether neutrinos have mass is VERY important to knowing which new model is correct.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
("His graduate student"? A wee-bit Freudian, don't you think??)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
But it did not prove His Existence, no?
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Yes, there are neutrino detectors. And yes, they can generated a fairly well-controlled beam of neutrinos. However, the detectors are usually gigantic tubs of water. Not the sort of thing you carry around in your back pocket. And the transmitter is a particle accellerator. You can't just pop a couple of AA batteries into them.
Why is it physicists always have the most horribly punnishing senses of humor?
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
. . . in short while the exact physics may have been off (damn, I should have paid more attention in Art School), the essence of what I said was correct - the neutrinos and photons are generated at the same time, and travel at the same speed, but the neutrinos get here first because they got out first. The photons were trapped during the first stages.
Why wasn't I moderated up? I need more karma. I deserve more karma. I'm not a fucking Signal11 wannabe dammit!
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
My problem with the idea of contacting a sub point-to-point (assuming you have the technology) is that the sub would have to give away its location. That's more or less counterproductive, as no one should know where the sub is (except in port). Only the captain knows where he is going, and he never even tells his superiors which path he intends to take. Point-to-point communication would have to be LOS (line of sight) and therefore traceable (estimable). This is why subs use VLF, which requires that you are near the surface. VLF (very low frequency waves) is broadcast out in all directions, so location is secure. (details are out there, but I can't quote you a site)
I got the recognition I deserve. Geordi LaForge doesn't know anything.
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
My first response to you was rushed an unfinished. I apologize.
/.
I'm glad you're not a troll. Mostly trolls don't respond to counter-posts. I enjoy some real communication on
To counter some more of your arguments...
About never seeing exotic particles under normal conditions: Not unless we somehow find a way to harness these exotic particles under 'normal' conditions, and if we don't do the research to find, categorize, and characterize these exotic particles, how do we expect to be able to use them?
By analogy, an electron was an exotic particle 400 years ago, but research into em and fields and math eventually, today, make it a very ordinary 'normal' condition particle. If we are to extrapolate 400 years into the future, who is to say that neutrinos and other exotic particles won't be integral to our communications and computation technology?
Then there is the counter, that we *do* see neutrinos under normal conditions. Another poster mentioned that the sun and nuclear applications generate neutrons, and as we refine our fission(and hopefully fusion!) technology, neutrinos become a more 'normal' aspect of our life.
About your point that fixing parameters in the Standard Model has not application in any other field:
If we can 'complete' the Standard Model, whether through neutrino research or otherwise, then there are a great many benefits. Among them, the fact that we can't yet describe gravity and it's relationship to quantum mechanics, or describe gravity as a quaternion(did I get this right, the more Techy among us?) when every other force we know of can be? Especially since there is hope that quantum effects and science is expected to lead a new generation in computing, information, and knowledge once transistors and 'conventional' physics hits it's limits?
About EVERYTHING an engineer needs is ordinary matter:
That's only true today, if true at all. Don't forget photons in your statement, besides protons, neutrons, and electrons. Are you saying that we won't be using neutrons in information processing devices in the future? How do we know at all, if we don't look at neutrinos?
About chemists and neutrinos and room temperature phyics:
Chemists, physicists, and scientists in general, are trying to perfect the science of superconductors, which is *not* room temperature at all. We'd like it if there are room temperature superconductors, but that is only possible if we can figure out how they work in the first place, and then construct one to fit the temperature, cost, manufacturing, and handling constraints we design. All we do know is that superconductors happen to use the same physics that govern everything else, so there is currently a gap in our knowledge that fails to explain how superconductors can exist *at all*, and perhaps it can be explained if we perfect our Standard Model, in which, wow, the tau neutrino exists. If our model can explain one extreme, it should explain the other.
More on the above subject, with our friend Maxwell. His equations have to be an approximation. They deal with light/em, but fail to explain superconductors, so we need something else. This will affect materials engineers who *need* to make these superconductors, and we can't know that tau neutrinos won't be crucial in the explanation of our physics.
About Newton and light:
Today, it is easy to produce and see all the time. We have diodes, lasers, light emitting materials, etc. He had candles, sunlight, and gas flames. It was definitely not easy in his time. Just has neutrinos (and other things) aren't easy in our times. Maybe 100 years from now we'll have neutrino based technology. Maybe we won't. Be we almost certainly won't if we don't study, research, and understand them.
High energy physics is useful! Don't knock it! High energy physics, in it's current incarnation, is very much an outlier and poorly understood field because it is so hard to get a hold of high energy particles and reactions. But if our model can describe the extreme high energy reactions well, and the same equations can describe the low energy reactions well, there is the possibility that along that spectrum there are 'quirks' that we can take advantage of that would not be seen if all we had were the low energy 'approximations' that Maxwell gave us.
Bye!
GPL Deconstructed
Surely you mean y=mx+c?
I believe this is so funny because there's a lot of truth to it. Some of the smartest people I know that I grew up with would routinely spend most of our algebra class talking warp drive theory.
Be nice to your friends. If it weren't for them, you'd be a complete stranger.
2ndpost! Insightful comments are the reason I read /. Not a flame but a great answer to what was in many ways a trollish question. The physics models that we use today are just as flawed as the ones that were being used 100, 200 or 400 years ago. Hopefully the human race will continue to fund basic research, in many ways it's like the lottery there are no sure winners but when it does hit everybody wins big. Will neutrino investigation have worth while benifits for us today or tomorrow who knows and who cares, but if we stop looking for answers we die as a species.
.
.
.
- dinosaurs didn't do basic science either
Of course they were impressed, they went "Cool, charge!!!" instead of "Charge!!!" Anyway, the great wall stops peopel declaring war on you (until the development of gunpowder), according to Civ.
I was on as an AC until I read this and was prompted to get on and make a quick comment (even though it's old and nobody will ever read it.) "Let me put it this way: is any chemist going to change how he works because the tau neutrino exists? No--his life is based on what happens near ROOM TEMPERATURE where any contributions of neutrino physics are either ZERO or taken into account by the effective fields that he uses (e.g. Maxwell's equations as an theory approximating QED)." Rarely are things people say simply, undoubtedly wrong. But this is one of those cases. I'm a chemist at U Pitt. (where Vittorio Paolone, one of the tau neutrino discoverers works!). My main project currently is high resolution UV molecular spectroscopy in the gas phase, where the temperature of the molecules is ~2K when crossed by the laser. This is chemistry at its most raw state, where molecules reveal their structure and interactions. At room temperature, this experiment is useless. There is another type of similar spectroscopy, microwave spec., where everything must be taken into account. This everything will probably include supernovae and GRB's when they are better understood, and currently neutrinos are thought to be very important in both SN's and GRB's. And so we see where molecules at extreme temperatures are in very valuable states, and where neutrinos may at some point be of importance to chemistry. True, the high school chemistry of mixing chemicals on Earth is rarely at extreme temperatures. But mixing chemicals is not chemistry. Understanding atoms and molecules is chemistry. And that is not necessarily done at room temperature, especially in interstellar gas clouds, where nature is doing the mixing. "EVERYTHING that any engineer might put into use is going to be made up of ordinary matter: i.e. protons, neutrons, electrons." Neutrinos, by their nature, are more "ordinary" and fundamental than protons, neutrons, or electrons(well, ok, maybe not electrons...). The understanding of neutrinos and other high energy subatomic particals can and will give insight into protons and neutrons and their interactions. On top of that, I think that anything that furthers our understanding of our origins and the matter that we're made of is worth the research. Let's also remember that many doubted the uses of Einstein's relativity when it became mainstream, but it is currently being *VERY* widely used in astronomy and practical matters like GPS. Just my thoughts. Enjoy! Rob
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
You know, posts like this really renew my interest in coming to SlashDot. After wading thru all the dreck, bad spelling, OS and license wars, once in awhile somebody lays out a nice intelligent argument. Somebody please mod this guy up!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Light has mass and it can travel at the speed of light.
Except that positronic brains are more Asimov's Robots (can you say Daneel R Olivey or whatever it is in the English version) than Star Trek.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
But in a recent ferminews, there was an article about how there may be 4 types of neutrinos - breaking the Standard Model! The article is here, on Fermi's site.
How, exactly? Forgive my naivete, but I thought nothing could travel faster than the speed of light? I'm sure I'm being WAY too simplistic here....
+++ATH0
Sorry, the parent message was supposed to be a question asking if light had mass?
I still haven't heard of a practical use for the neutrinos other than to give scientists something to do. Is there someway we can use these for a practical purpose or to explain anything???
If there isn't, why are we wasting our money??
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
Wait, isn't Tau Neutrino Amiga's new OS????
Who am I? Subscribe and find out
In related news, the scientists who conducted the study are co-authoring a book on the subject, entitled The Tau of Neutrinos.
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Slashdot requires you to wait 1 minute between each submission of /comments.pl in order to allow everyone to have a fair chance to post.
It's been 1 minute since your last submission!
Wait a minute! (I did!) Oh!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
In the He Man movie, Billy Barty converted a 56 Chevy to run on neutrinos.
Now that's progress!
The interesting thing about this is how the found the proof for tau neutrino existence: their beam left millions of tracks in 3D medium. What they were looking for is a 1 mm track left by a decaying particle, "a track with a kink" as they call it. Computer controlled cameras were used, and I bet some supercomputers were used to search for this pattern (or maybe just a lot of work studies and interns). If this is not an application for distributed computing, I don't know what is.
A fun quote from the article : "Stanford University physicist Martin Perl, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for discovering the tau lepton, the first indicator for a third generation of particles, congratulated the DONUT experimenters."
I remember the Neutrinos. They were those funny little things on the Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles. I think I just dropped in karma. TURTLE POWER!
Probably way to late to reply, but... ^_^
No, it didn't prove His existence. Doh! Well, I guess that wraps it up for religion. Humanism, here I come... Wait a minute...
Prove for me that mass bends space-time. You can't! You can merely demonstrate that if you assume mass bends space-time according to certain rules then the experiment you perform has results consistent with that assumption.
Just like my experiment will have results consistent with the assumption that God exists and that He doesn't like pushy mortals. ^_^
The enemies of Democracy are
here here!
This is a really good post and well worthy of quite a few + mod points. I wish I could articulate (and expand) my original post as well as you did.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Um, no... photons do not have 'rest mass' last I heard.
Also, last I heard, it took infinite energy to accelerate a particle with mass up to the speed of light.
So what gives?
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
To all ya'lls, thank you for responding and not trolling me. I must say, now I am quite impressed by this! Cool!
-DG
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
Light doesn't have mass, it does have energy, and so could in theory be converted to something with mass.
Sorry... it was meant to be joking... yo know kinda funny. I raely even check my Score bonus off... sorry if I offended.
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
I don't know about you, but a large sphere full of mineral oil has much kinkier applications than physics (although I did once try to compute the acceleration due to gravity on a waterbed).
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
anyone else as curious as I am as to whether having the slashdot effect on fermilabs network connection caused the world of neutrino science to be slowed down for one day? it makes you wonder... did slashdot just 'cause the next big thing to happen one day later just 'cause no one could use their email or their network? :)
I never knew Canada was that "high-tech"!!
They don't do the calorimetry on the neutrino itself. They saw the creationg and decay of a tau lepton inside the tank. The sudden presence of a tau lepton cannot be explained by current theories without having a tau neutrino present.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Yeah. On Monday, a colloquium speaker at CERN told us to expect the announcement on Friday. I'd have submitted an article then, but I had to URL to link to...
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
All you AC's are really stretching for this.
CT==X-ray, NMR==radio waves exciting magnetic spins
Neither=meson or cosmic-ray physics. Bzzt. Thank you for playing, anyway.
Yah, hence the "Really bad" part. But they're sorta spelled the same...
So "tau" rhymes with "toe," then?
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
The tau-neutrino is predicted by the standard model but massive neutrinos are not. In fact, the standard model cannot predict, or account for, mass without the Higgs Field Particle, which has not been observed yet. Masses to neutrinos is not part of the basic SM, the different theories are additions to the SM, or in geek speak, modules. There are two discussions one whether neutrinos have masses, there is the massive neutrino theory and the light neutrino theory. Neither have been fully accepted into the SM.
The SM has been broken for quite some time anyway, every sense the introduction of the Higgs Field particle. There have been numerous attempts to remove the SM because of its flaws. The only reason we haven't thrown it out yet is that there is nothing else that everyone can agree on as being a better truth. Whether it be Technicolor, SUSY, mSUGRA, SUSY with mSUGRA, etc...
The whole mass issue has been a problem with the standard model, that and unification theory. First it didn't predict/account for masses. The fudge factor that was introduced, the Higgs Field particle, which eliviate that problem had a diverging predicted mass for itself. Now most people agree that neutrinos have mass, but are they light or massive. Even with the Higgs boson all of the forces do not unite at a given energy, which is another problem.
(begin rant)
The Standard Model is broken, it has been broken, and as it stands it will always be broken. It's time to get a new model. Whoops the government probably won't support the NLC because the amount of money that the US would have to contribute in this multinational effert is equal to 2-3% of the our militaries budget. Now what?
(end rant)
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
What actually happens is that the neutrino smashes into something and leaves a charged particle moving through the water faster than c/refractive index (the speed of light in the medium), and that makes Cerenkov radiation. It's not quite as direct as you paint it.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
There are plans to send neutrinos underground from Fermilab to a particle detector in the 1500-foot deep Soudan mine in northern Minnesota. The purpose is detecting decays or oscillations to demonstrate/measure neutrino mass. I don't know the status of this idea.
:-)
I also don't know whether that means you can transmit armed forces radio via neutrino
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
It all depends on how we defined SM I guess. You are correct on all points. Let me clarify my points :
"SM" is broken. I presume the original article means SM is wrong. We believed it is wrong. But it is not "broken" it the way you state it. Your "broken SM" actually is "Spontaneously Broken Symmetry" (or Phase Transition), which is easily accomadated by the SM (via the Higgs mechanism etc etc.)
Also, massive neutrino is not Death to SM. SM can easily _accomodate_ (the emphasis) the existence of mass in neutrinos. Basically, neutrinos are believed to be either RH or LH (depending on whether it is a baryon or anti-baryon), but not "mixed". This imply that neutrinos conserved the so-call "chiral symmetry". We can always say that neutrinos do not conserve Chiral symmetry, and then there would be neutrino "oscillations", i.e. mass. So that's not a problem to the SM.
I guess your SM is a more constrained version of my SM. My idea of a "crack SM" is that SM is proven wrong, which it is. But not by discovery of massive Tau Neutrino.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
...for a discussion on neutrino oscillation, mass, and chiral symmetry conservation.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Neutrinos may never be of such practical importance, but just for understanding what the universe is about and thus what we are a part of... this knowledge is priceless.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Light doesn't have mass.
Yeah. great idea. To create neutrinos in "detectable" quantities you need a source/transmitter. Your choices: 1) star 2) particle accelerator neither of which is particularly cheap AND easy to modulate. a receiver: your choices:
How many computers did IBM think that the world needed ? How big was the first computer ? ... We may end up seeing household sized particle accelerators in the next few hundred years.
Whether there is a crunch or not, etc. is determined by mass density and cosmological constant. Whether there is a "series" of bangs following crunches cannot be determined by any known physics -- classical GR can't handle it and quantum gravity isn't worked out yet.
Well you are right, tau neutrinos have no practical use. Putting men on the moon or sending probes to mars had no practical use. The Pyramids had no practical use, and neither had the chinese wall.
These achievements serve a different purpose. The cost seems very high, but it's only relatively small compared to what we spend on other things that have no practical use, like hollywood movies, beer, and the starwars project part 1 and 2. Although military spending does have a practical use, the amount the military gets to spend on things they want but don't really need dwarfs the cost of building that hand full of particle accellerators the world has.
So yes, from an engineering point of view, using empirical data is as valuable and often more practical than refining the theory to understand every aspect of a project at the design stage, but finding the theory that unifies all the forces in nature, and finally gives us a full understanding of how the universe works, is a project like going to the moon or building pyramids. It's one of the ways we give meaning to life.
IANAPhysicist, so please explain or provide a link: Why not?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I though the "Super-Kamiokande" was Nintendo's next-generation game console?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Big deal, I say. If it wasn't constantly being proven wrong (or "not entirely correct" ^_^), science would be boring.
Then it wouldn't be science, it would be christianity. That's why science is so much more fun, you get to prove theories of the universe are wrong w/o the risk of going to hell.
---
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
When the occassional neutrino interacts with a water molecule, they use calorimetry to measure its energy and thus deduce its mass. Now if this sounds like a very imprecise measurement method, it is.
That would be pretty imprecise, given that you're dealing with abandoned mines filled with water or the Pacific ocean. Is that really how they do it, though? I know neutrino detection is typically done by light sensor arrays picking up Cerenkov radiation from neutrinos hitting the water (example). Maybe the mass is calculated differently, though.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The mass density of the Universe only states whether :
(a) There is a Big Bang/no Big Bang.....
(b) There is a Big Crunch/No Big Crunch
(c) The universe is open/close (different from b)
*(d) an a possible, with some fudging, a universe that is "idling" (i.e. spend a lot of time in some state)
Whether or not the universe has a "series" of BB or BC depends on the magnitude of the Cosmological constant and the exact curvature of space (which we now think is flat, which precludes the "oscillating: model).
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Neutrinos have mass. See here
an announcement dating from June '98 to that effect.
and this doesn't break the standard model at all, btw
The way I pronounce it, it rhymes with "ow"
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
aaarrrgrgdhrgdhdghrgdhgdhgdrgdgfgdggghhhh
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
But, even under Massive Attack, inquiring minds want to know:
Is the Tao Neutrino Open Source?
Is it GPL?
Can we build a Beowulf Cluster out of Tao Neutrinos?
[had to do it - surface tension breaker]
Will in Seattle
I hope that the particle does have a decent mass. First off, it will help us decipher exactly how much dark matter is out there. Secondly, it will help us figure out if the universe is either going to expand forever, expand to a point, or eventually contract down upon itself. The more mass these neutrinos have, the more likely it is that the universe is a never ending series of Big Bangs and Big Crunches.
The tau neutrino is PREDICTED by the SM! So how it's detection break it?
Also, massive neutrinos are easily accomadated by the SM too, so that's a non-issue.
Having said that, the SM is now widely believed to be INCOMPLETE, i.e. it is just a low energy approximation of some thing more complete. (Yes, we only have accelerators at "low" energy, even the dead Supercollider is "low" energy..)
/. should really have a resident science nut.
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Comments of "Get a life, you trekkie" and "Move out of your parents' basement" did not receive replies.
I think you are mistaken I was detecting more of a red shift there not black hole??
Perhaps a new Phenomena a RED HOLE??????????????
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
....First off, it will help us decipher exactly how much dark matter is out there It's now generally believed that neutrinos do not, even at the best estimate, have sufficient mass to make up the "dark matter". .... Secondly, it will help us figure out if the universe is either going to expand forever, expand to a point, or eventually contract down upon itself The Cosmological Constant is now in vogue as a solution to the "missing mass" problem. ....The more mass these neutrinos have, the more likely it is that the universe is a never ending series of Big Bangs and Big Crunches. This statement is, of course, totally wrong. The mass density of the universe do not decide whether we wil have a series of BB and BC or not.
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And, outside the medical world, muons are used for used in studying the magnetic properties of materials. So, some of our understanding of superconductors comes from muons.
These scientists took pictures of my brain, and now their putting them on a web-site!
FOR THE LAST TIME, IT MAY BE SUBATOMIC BUT I DID NOT GPL MY BRAIN.
"Semper in excretum set alta variant"
I guess that's what Homer Simpson was working on at the Springfield nuclear plant.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
My favorite device in the experiment is the DONUT detector. Although they claim to have used this to find Tau neutrinos, the REAL purpose of this detector is to identify and locate tasty toroidal snack and dessert foods for consumption by hungry physicists.
As I recall, the Tau-Neutrino would be the most massive of the Triplet Electron-Neutrino and Muon-Neutrino. If they didn't directly observe mass on this particle, I'd hate to think how low the mass was on the others. Personally I think Muons and Tao particles ROCK with their Neutrino pairs, not like those LAMER Electrons which like to hang out with those blasted up-n-down quarks in their trinary configurations of 2-1 no matter how strong those gluons are! :)
Be Seeing You,
Jeffrey.
Time Lord, Dark Horse: The Techno Mage of Gallifrey
I hear the next phase is the development of the SNO CONE, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory for Connect Optometric Neutrino Establishments.
Eh?
Will in Seattle
Look, you high-energy folks are always talking about "unforeseeable applications" but the fact is that you need these multi-billion dollar instruments to generate, e.g., tau leptons, even in extremely small quantities, because they just DON'T EXIST UNDER NORMAL CONDITIONS, i.e., in any conditions in the universe after it was a few minutes old. Knowing more about the tau neutrino lets you fix some parameters in the Standard Model that have NO APPLICATION in any other field.
EVERYTHING that any engineer might put into use is going to be made up of ordinary matter: i.e. protons, neutrons, electrons. If these experiments don't tell us more about these, they will never be put to practical use.
Let me put it this way: is any chemist going to change how he works because the tau neutrino exists? No--his life is based on what happens near ROOM TEMPERATURE where any contributions of neutrino physics are either ZERO or taken into account by the effective fields that he uses (e.g. Maxwell's equations as an theory approximating QED). Is any materials engineer going to change how he works? No. And all the other engineers use what the chemists and materials guys dream up.
Newton was working with light. Light is all around us: easy to produce, and we see it all the time, literally. People have been working on improving materials since prehistoric times. These fields are obviously about things that are real and practically useful.
High-energy physics is only useful for cosmologists. Which is only useful if you plan to be around for billions of years, or for religion. Accept this fact. If you are in high-energy physics and wanted to have a *practical* impact on the world, you made the wrong choice. Sorry.
a source/transmitter. Your choices:
- 1) star
- 2) particle accelerator
neither of which is particularly cheap AND easy to modulate.a receiver: your choices:
Oh yeah, (1) needs to be under huge amounts of ROCK to avoid detecting all sorts of other garbage. Neither one is going to fit very well into a sub, and the sophisticated chemistry won't fit very well with the submariners.
Not to mention the "practical" details, like, most US subs have nuclear reactors that likely contribute a huge background compared to the neutrino signal.
The main point is that neutrinos DO pass through matter almost like it wasn't there. Unfortunately, most things you use to detect them are made of matter.
'Tao' is pronounced 'dao' (or 'dow', or whatever). Tau is phonetic.
You aren't an AC, so I'll give you credit beyond just a troll post.
Basic scientific research like this gives us rewards we cannot measure or calculate. It's premise is that we are studying the unknown, so the rewards are just as unknown.
In a similar vein, look at Newton, playing with light, over 200 years ago. How useful was his research into photons, spectra, etc. But look today, at our lasers, our CD players, our gas spectrometers, our fiber optics, etc.
The problem is that we have to do research today for our advances 200 years from now; or farther! Imagine the ridicule chemists of 400 years past had to face, from people who didn't understand the worth of their research? No fault to the people, because they cannot obviously imagine titanium alloys, ceramic superconductors, high energy density batteries, etc. Likewise, you can't be faulted for not envisioning what research of today will give us in the future. No one knows!
Bye!
GPL Deconstructed
Nuff-said.
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I like the new trend towards announcements announcing upcoming announcements. The same thing happened with the Martian water thing and a few other recent stories.
I'd like to pre-emptively announce the announcement of an annoucement tomorrow announcing a new product!
You are forgetting about serindipidity. The pursuit of unknown properties of physics that may never benefit man will most definitely lead to other discoveries that will. The knowledge that man kind gains from this research will probably lead others down different paths to develop things never imagined before. What ever it is they develop may not be directly related to research into the neutrino but it will never have happened unless the research on the neutrino was conducted.
Then the other side of it is the new tools developed for studying the neutrino have most definitely progressed the sensitivity of measurement devices. These new devices, or more precisely, the technology gained from the development of these new devices will lead science and hence man kind into new wonderful directions never dreamed of before.
Just because it doesn't appear to give any results doesn't mean that it won't or already hasn't. The research into the neutrino has already impacted society more than anybody can measure.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
It turns out that the observed helium we see in the universe puts very tight limits on the number of neutrino families.
Three being the most likely, four being just barely able to fit with the rest of our observations. Also, three is also a likely choice, given the whole "we're only seeing one-third of the neutrinos we expect from the sun" plus "neutrino oscillation." Four, well, it's possible, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Damn me for not knowing it offhand, but there's a pretty famous quote about a queen in some country asking a scientist just how he thought all of this electricity stuff was going to be useful. Might have even seen it here.
Anyway, it's not "can we find a use for neutrinos." Neutrinos interact only weakly (a bit of a physics pun, they don't listen to the strong nuclear force, aka colorforce, just gravity and the weak nuclear), and are fairly intractable.
What is potentially useful is the understanding they give us. With them, we might be able to better understand, say, the weak nuclear force involved in beta decay better. If this sounds abtruse, how about the idea of making old nuclear waste radiate down to stable iron atoms and various other smaller, stable nuclei? Waste disposal problem solved.
In the large scheme of things, neutrinos themselves may not be particularly interesting, but specific numbers, like mass, may eventually answer questions like: Will the universe expand forever, or will it be reborn after a Big Crunch? And, what's the field equation that runs the universe?
Just try understanding electricity without magnetism, and you'll see what I mean.
a receiver: your choices: 1) **huge** tank of cleaning fluid and array of photomultiplier tubes
... :-)
As I recall, the proposal thought that the vast quantity of water surrounding the sub might be in some way used for detection. Hey, I never said I thought that this would work, just that someone wanted funds to look into it.
Now the proposal to use modulated black holes to communicate via gravity waves, that had some promise
OK. I'll ignore the ad hominem portion of your argument, and assume you had another argument you wanted to make.
If you want me to admit that this research does have "applications," the detector people do process a huge amount of data, so they are possibly making advances in data processing hardware & software. So are lots of people in other fields (bioinformatics, enterprise software...), some of which actually make money instead of just spending it.
As far as interconnected--who goes to the high energy meetings besides high energy physicists?
Or are you counting on all the garbled accounts in the mainstream press to have influence?
Anyway, I didn't propose restricting research to "immediately practical" fields. There's a big difference between "far from practical" and "never, ever, ever going to be practical." The first transistor was far from practical. Most mathematics is far from practical.
Is anyone, for instance, working on *applications* of 1950s era particle physics?
I took my senior particle physics course from one of the physicists working on Super-K. Dr. Learned spent more time going into neutrino oscillation than focusing on the course material, which was fine by me, as I was the only registered student in the class, and quite enjoyed the tap-in-the-fountain course. So here goes...
One of the models that fits the Super-K results (mind you, we're talking huge margins of error... in some data, 2-3 SDs) involves one sterile (non-interacting) neutrino; another involves three sterile neutrinos, at energy (mass) levels significantly larger than their corresponding interacting neutrinos. All of these possibilities are modeled against several sources; Blackbody spectral distribution, solar neutrino density (also mapped wrt time of year and day, etc) known decay densities (which come out of particle physics, which is hardly elegant and superstring theory models, which are hardly verifiable) and cosmic neutrino burst speeds (so far, we haven't had a huge neutrino producing cosmic event occur that caused neutrino detection to spike a measurable time interval after the photon detection... shame, that, and it really forces the upper limit on electron neutrino mass down, which is ugly if you assume those are massless neutrinos... but oscillation models require mass on "heavier" neutrinos, which means... aw, the hell with it... this is why I ended up liking solid state so much.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
Is the Tao neutrino the particle responsible for the balance of all forces in the universe? I assume the other two are the Yin neutrino and the Yang neutrino. Excuse me while I go catch up in Lao Tzu's textbook on particle physics.
Also, evidence of rotation curves suggests more mass in certain. The velocity of anything orbiting it's center depends on it's total mass, and the distance from the center. The curves scientists (namely Rubin, and Freeman, among others) discovered didn't match with the mass they could see. (see Kepler's Law)
It's a common theory that neutrinos make up much of this Dark Matter. And why that's important, is because the idea is fairly recent, and to find that many ideas about astrophysics may have, in fact, been wrong all this time (since we cant see everything, or in some cases anywhere near most of everything in a system). So.. any conclusions based on systems which are composed of a large % of dark matter are incorrect. It may cause us to rethink nearly everything we know about astro physics.
So that's why it's important.
"I don't want the world, I just want your half"