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Scientists May Have Discovered a New Fundamental Particle: Sterile Neutrino (theregister.co.uk)
Artem Tashkinov writes: It needs more sigmas, but Fermilab boffins in America are carefully speculating that they may have seen evidence of a new fundamental particle: the sterile neutrino. The suggestion follows tests conducted by the MiniBooNE (Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment) instrument, located near Chicago. Its mission is to detect neutrino mass through their oscillations. In the Standard Model of physics, neutrinos, like all particles, are initially assumed to be massless, but some observations, like neutrino oscillation, suggest there's mass there. The experiment that possibly detected sterile neutrinos collected 15 years of data from its commissioning in 2002, and the results have only now reached pre-press outlet arXiv.
Over 15 years, MiniBooNE detected a few hundred more electron neutrinos than were predicted in Standard Model theory. The extra particles suggests there is a fourth, heavier flavor. The findings bring the MiniBooNE team tantalizingly close to a "result" -- it's a 4.8 sigma result, when "discovery" demands 5 sigma.
Over 15 years, MiniBooNE detected a few hundred more electron neutrinos than were predicted in Standard Model theory. The extra particles suggests there is a fourth, heavier flavor. The findings bring the MiniBooNE team tantalizingly close to a "result" -- it's a 4.8 sigma result, when "discovery" demands 5 sigma.
Sterile neutrinos (or inert neutrinos) are particles that interact only via gravity and do not interact via any of the fundamental interactions of the Standard Model.
One little sentence in the summary would have made it SO much more worth reading.
"Many boffins died to bring us this information."
I understand about 20% of what you said. It just reminds me everything stays super complicated down to the level is a bunch of different subatomic particles that we don't understand at all. All this complex system Ina single atom. Then 100 trillion atoms in a single cell of my body, making up complex structures such as ion pumps to move various things in and out of the cell, self-replication machinery, thousands of structures. With all of these systems within systems within systems too complex for physicists to understand, even your ear being far more complex than a Core i7.
Amazing that all of it, all of these systems and structures, quintillions of individual parts just happened to randomly come together into perfectly working, self-sufficient systems without any of it ever being designed.
One has to ask: was this neutrino born sterile, or was it "fixed" because it lepton some poor physicist and left a meson his leg?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Seriously, wtf, how does this get on here?
Because this is shit science reporting to nth degree. What scientists have found is a more controllable source of neutrinos, ones that result from kaon decay, that can eliminate the variability that prevents neutrino experiments from being conclusive. That this was in any way connected with sterile neutrinos is because it was an accidental discovery from an apparently inconclusive experiment trying to find sterile neutrinos, but the discovery itself is no indication of whether sterile neutrinos exist or not.
There, the truth, now please never ever link to another shit site that does this again: https://smbc-comics.com/comic/...
Spelling in Troll English does not correspond to either language.
Is this The Sun or /. ?
Is this /. or The Register?
(yes of course the link is to the Register, who over-uses the word Boffins like a bartender does ambien)
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Higgs interactions do not count, as the Higgs is not a fundamental force.
Higgs interactions do count if you are counting interactions. It is wrong to say that they only interact via gravity if they also interact via the Higgs. It might not be a force but it is an interaction. For example, if Dark Matter interacts via the Higgs we would not say that its only interaction is via gravity.
The paper makes no mention of the tau neutrino which, at these energies, would appear "sterile" because there is not enough energy to produce a tau. Indeed the paper keeps using what it calls the "two neutrino" model when we know there are three neutrinos which oscillate.
Some justification as to why the tau neutrino is excluded would be helpful as would a three-neutrino analysis even if the mixing angles mean that the tau component is negligible. I suspect there are some good justifications for this approximation but it would be nice if they included them in a paper that is making such strong claims.
As some posters in this thread on Physics Forums pointed out in http://physicsforums.com/threa... , this result is a bad fit of the data and contradicts other experiments like the Planck satellite results.
Non-sterile neutrinos reproduce like Schrodinger Rabbits, or not.
Table-ized A.I.
Experimental Particle Phycist Tomasso Dorirgo http://www.science20.com/tomma... doesn't rate the 4.8 sigma excess satistics as valid, thinks the systematic uncertainitys are much bigger.
Because no one really gives a damn. So the first lady recently had surgery and is not doing any press. So what? I have more issues with her husband being an idiot all the time.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
While I am on the subject, medal is a noun "oh a noun is a person place or thing" (thank you Schoolhouse rock) not a verb, whereas "meddle" is a verb since it describes an action.
You made a simple grammar mistake, but when called on it, you doubled down and not only made the same mistake again, you made another one on top of it. You've given us a textbook example of Skitt's Law and. I'd argue, a good example of the Dunning-Kruger effect as well.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Being raised in that sort of environment is highly unlikely to produce admirable people or behaviours. It is the archetype for spoiled rich kid.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Proxima Centauri is a star. A colony on that would be...warm?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I felt the same reading the OP so I dug up a bit on what it all means and found it quite interesting. We asked where the mass comes from, but we didn't say what we meant by mass. In classical physics, mass just "is" -- it's a fundamental property of matter, that gives things weight in gravity. But in quantum mechanics, mass is a property derived from the energy of a fundamental zero-volume "particle" like photon or electron, or a system like the helium nucleus (which we see it as two neutrons plus two protons, but it's really a "cage" for the 12 point-particles -- quarks -- that make those 4 nucleons.) When the energy of the particle/system changes, its mass changes as well. The E=mc2 captures this relation.
What the OP referred to is that the proton has a "resting" (non-moving) mass of 938 of some units, but the three quarks that make it have the rest mass of 9 of those units. The difference comes from the force that binds those quarks into a proton, and that force is carried by "particles" called "gluons". I put particles in quotes because the diameter of fundamental particles is thought to be exactly zero -- everything that makes the visible world is made of empty, non-material twists in space so to speak. ... Now reading what I wrote it doesn't seem much less complicated from what the OP wrote, and I don't even understand a tenth of the stuff. You may want to read this paper, which is fairly accessible as far as QM papers go:
"What is the physical meaning of mass in view of wave-particle duality? A proposed model" https://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/...
For my part, I'd only add that this is just a model -- quarks, electrons, photons etc. aren't "really" out there, those are all unknowable manifestation of nature that we interpret through our model. As that Nazi Werner Heisenberg said, "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Nevertheless, it's a very useful model -- for one thing it let us made the bomb to help defeat the Nazis. :-)
Thanks.