Slashdot Mirror
Follow Up On Solar Neutrinos and Radioactive Decay
An anonymous reader writes "A few days ago, Slashdot carried a story that was making the rounds: a team of physicists claimed to have detected a strange variation in radioactive decay rates, which they attributed to the mysterious influence of solar neutrinos. The findings attracted immediate attention because they seemed to upend two tenets of physics: that radioactive decay is constant, and that neutrinos very, very rarely interact with matter (trillions of the particles are zinging through your body right now). So Discover Magazine's news blog 80beats followed up on the initial burst of news and interviewed several physicists who work on neutrinos. They are decidedly skeptical."
Depends on the energy. (A more detailed energy slicing won't be necessary) Low energy neutrinos order of few KeV, come mostly from the sun. High energy neutrinos Above the few KeV threshold mostly comes from Cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere. As for cosmic neutrinos, well good luck with that! I work in a neutrino experiment (ANTARES) , and I wish that we can detect cosmic neutrinos with abundance, it's just that there isn't enough to influence anything.
Variability in half life/decay rates is unlikely, and this data is not nearly enough to prove a significant effect. Because of the massive amount of research done on radioactive decay as part of various nations bomb making projects, looking for ways to get a hyper-fast reaction with less material or get criticality at all from some borderline case substances, this data would have to be supported by a quality new major research project to be taken at all seriously. Probably, the study would have to get a similar 33 day cycle for the same isotopes as these reports, AND find the same cycle for a bunch of others, AND rule out some of the possible alternate causes by doubleblind testing.
If that's done by some place such as MIT or one of the national labs, and the data glitch persists, then it starts counting as very significant. For just one reason, Supersymetry theories predict short lived supersymetric particles such as the Selectron and the Sneutrino. The supersymetric versions of particles have substantially more rest mass than the regular versions. Neutrinos that couple more strongly to neutron cross section of a nucleus could arguably actually be Sneutrinos. To live long enough to cross the 8 light minute gap between Earth and Sun, they would have to be moving at incredibly close to the speed of light, much more so than for regular neutrinos, which are already very close (around 99.0%). Somewhere around 99.97% of C, you get enough time dilation on Sneutrinos that they could routinely make it across the gap.
So, solar emission models for this effect could be predicting both a way to experimentally validate Supersymetry AND the existence of a reaction deep inside the solar core that produces such incredibly energetic particles. Furthermore, you could derive the energy of the initial solar reaction by sending a space probe outward towards Mars and perhaps beyond, and having it run constant testing on a radioactive isotope sample on-board to see if/when the effect falls off. Such an experiment could be incorporated into an existing planned mission, say another Mars Observer or Cassini to Saturn style probe.
That's why this is interesting - it may be a 10,000 to 1 longshot, but a. If it's true, it's a major step for both subatomic physics and astrophysics, and b. if it's true, it makes some predictions where we can do further experiments and refine the theories, and some of these should be in a reasonable cost range compared to alternates (such as building a particle accelerator from the Earth to the Moon to possibly get a little closer to proving/disproving Supersymetry).
Who is John Cabal?