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Muon Neutrino To Electron Neutrino Oscillation Conclusively Shown
New submitter Chris Greenley writes "The T2K long baseline neutrino experiment in Japan has just announced conclusive evidence for electron to muon neutrino oscillation at the 7.5 sigma level. (The level needed for discovery is 5 sigma.) This experiment generates a focused beam of electron neutrinos using an accelerator in the J-PARC facility north of Tokyo which is aimed at the massive Super-Kamiokande detector 295 km (185 miles) away, near the west coast of Japan. 'This T2K observation is the first of its kind in that an explicit appearance of a unique flavor of neutrino at a detection point is unequivocally observed from a different flavor of neutrino at its production point.' This result clears the way for CP-violation neutrino studies which could show that 'regular' neutrinos act differently than their antimatter counterparts, a phenomenon that so far has only been observed in quarks. If neutrino CP-violation is found, it could explain why there is such a large predominance of matter over antimatter in the universe."
If anyone had any doubts that Slashdot, the original formula, was dead, I think the comments (both present and not) here prove it.
Still, I think in this century materials and systems will be developed which can detect neutrinos 1000 times better than today. That opens up new possibilities in astronomy (solar neutrinos, AGN, looking past the CMB just to name a few).
It could be that there is no magic material that improves interaction and that we will have to just deal with the fact that most neutrinos will not hit anything, regardless of how the detector is constructed. The only road forward for improved detection then would be to make a larger detector. Although projects like IceCube already have detector volumes over a cubic kilometer.