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posted by janrinok on Monday June 04 2018, @08:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the sneaky-neutrinos dept.

From LiveScience.com: A Major Physics Experiment Just Detected A Particle That Shouldn't Exist

Physics just can't seem to stop churning out experiments with odd results. Will this one be the ONE that finally upsets the Standard Model?

Scientists have produced the firmest evidence yet of so-called sterile neutrinos, mysterious particles that pass through matter without interacting with it at all.

The first hints these elusive particles turned up decades ago. But after years of dedicated searches, scientists have been unable to find any other evidence for them, with many experiments contradicting those old results. These new results now leave scientists with two robust experiments that seem to demonstrate the existence of sterile neutrinos, even as other experiments continue to suggest sterile neutrinos don't exist at all.

That means there's something strange happening in the universe that is making humanity's most cutting-edge physics experiments contradict one another.

And from https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/04/miniboone_sterile_neturinos/ we get:

The MiniBooNE experiment is straightforward: proton collisions (12.84 x 1020 protons, to be precise) emit neutrinos, and the instrument fired muon neutrinos at an oil tank. Some of those oscillated into electron neutrinos, so their interaction with the oil produce flashes that instruments can detect.

The oscillation rate is predictable, so even a few hundred extra electron neutrinos are a result.

Physicist and blogger Sabine Hossenfender explained the significance in this Tweet thread, in which she noted:

"The new data from MiniBooNE confirms that this tension in the data is real. This data can (to my best knowledge) NOT be fitted with the standard framework. It requires either new particles (sterile neutrinos) or some kind of symmetry violation. She added: "Now it's time for theoretical physicists to come up with an explanation"."

The known neutrinos – electron, muon, and tau – all interact via the electroweak force as well as gravity, which makes them identifiable by scintillators.

The hints that a sterile flavour might exist arise because of neutrino oscillations – the little blighters like to flip between different flavours.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:37AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:37AM (#688768)

    Regarding the simulations, which are more or less calculations with some randomness introduced into the variables (else they would be just calculations with the same outcome every time, like 1+1=2), this randomness introduces statistical errors. How big should this error be in respect to the used huge numbers in your simulations? Could those extra wheels be explained?

    I'm not a physicist.