If you like discoveries of new fundamental atom , this is not a good calendar month . Last week CERNannouncedthat a rumored new particle was nothing but a flue , and today descend the news that there is no quaternary case of neutrino , a hypothetical speck that only interacts with gravity , know as a sterile neutrino .
The study , published inPhysical Review Letters , fare from IceCube , a neutrino observatory in Antarctica . scientist analyzed about 100,000 neutrino event respect in 2015 without finding a single indication of the existence of sterile neutrino . The team is 99 per centum certain that it does not exist .
The lookout station is located in the South Pole , and the instruments occupy a intensity of about 1 cubic kilometer ( 0.24 cubic miles)of clear Antarctic ice , hence the name IceCube . The observatory has 5,160 digital optical module locate atdepths between 1,450 and 2,450 metre ( 4,760 and 8,040 foot ) . When a neutrino interacts with the ice it give off a cascade of corpuscle , and the detectors read the energy and direction of the new subatomic particle . Researchers can then work out what the original neutrino looked like .
uninventive neutrinos were introduced to figure out one of the problems with the Standard Model of particle purgative . According to the model , there are three types of neutrinos ( electron , negative muon , and tau ) and they are massless . Neutrinos are only left - handed ( their twisting always point in the opposite way of their momentum ) , with this exclusivity only being allowed as long as they are massless .
In 1998 , experimental grounds argue that neutrino were able to vacillate from one type to another , a discovery that clear the researchers the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics , but which also meant that neutrinos could have mass . This conduce scientists to introduce the concept of a right on - handed neutrino , called a sterile neutrino , to explicate the limitations of the Standard Model .
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory instruments occupy a volume of or so 1 cubic km ofclear Antarctic meth at the South Pole . IceCube quislingism .
“ If you throw in a fourth neutrino , it changes everything , ” explained Francis Halzen , a University of Wisconsin - Madison prof of physics and main investigator for IceCube , in astatement .
“ Sterile means it does n’t interact with matter itself , although it can dramatically interfere with the elbow room conventional neutrinos do . ”
These neutrino would only interact through graveness and none of the other forces , alike to coloured matter , another cryptical and yet to be experimentally confirmed forcible phenomenon . Although there has never been a find , several experiment had antecedently hinted at potential detection of infertile neutrinos .
“ Like Elvis , people see hints of the aseptic neutrino everywhere , ” added Halzen . “ There was this solicitation of wind , and theorists were convince it exists . ”
Although it is probable that the sterile neutrino does n’t survive , this is not yet a scientific certainty . That will only be reach when they have hit a 99.99994 pct sure thing . This might not be the end of sterile neutrino , but it ’s a very strong denotation that we need to start appear for different explanations .
