Quantum Physics

   

Einstein and the Neutrino Versus 3 Nobel Prizes of the Last 45 Years

Authors: Rodney Bartlett

This article surprised the author because there was no intention of addressing the theories of quarks, the nuclear weak force or the Higgs field at first. The article eventually led to pointing a way out of those Nobel Prize winning theories, though (in 1969, 1979 and 2013 respectively). And that way out gives me a deep feeling of satisfaction. The universe is awash with the peculiar subatomic particles called neutrinos. They have no electrical charge, are nearly massless (at least a million times as light as an electron), and trillions of these ghostly particles sail right through stars, planets, you, and me every second. They don't interact with the strong force which binds protons and neutrons together in atomic nuclei, nor do they interact with electromagnetic fields. To give an idea of how unreactive they are - in 2013, physicists in the USA began shooting neutrinos on a 503-mile trip from Fermilab (the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) west of Chicago to a detector in Minnesota. 150 trillion neutrinos leave Fermilab each second but only about ten interact with the detector in a whole week. Speaking of their near masslessness, physicists already know the Standard Model of particle physics (the theory of how particles and forces interact) is incomplete because it incorrectly predicts neutrinos possess no mass). Problems addressed in this article include 1) each particle is born as one of 3 flavors, or types - electron neutrino, muon neutrino or tau neutrino - but they can change flavor in a few thousandths of a second as they travel, 2) as far as scientists can tell, each neutrino is a combination of those 3 masses but they don't know which of the mixes is heaviest and which is lightest (this is the "mass ordering" problem), 3) the fundamental property of quantum systems called entanglement which means two quantum systems can become correlated in such a way that action on one system has implications for the outcome of a measurement on the other, and 4) single and double beta decay which involves neutron(s) decaying into proton(s) and emitting electron(s) plus antineutrino(s) in which, in double decay, the reaction is neutrinoless in some instances since an antineutrino is absorbed by a neutron as a neutrino (suggesting a neutrino is its own antiparticle).

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[v1] 2014-09-22 22:22:31

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