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Tentative evidence supporting the possible existence of "sterile neutrinos" is reported in the current SciAm:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-whole-lot-of-nothing
If anyone can fill in details for us, or elaborate on points made in the short news article, please do.
==sample excerpt==
...
... Alexander Kusenko of the University of California, Los Angeles... and Michael Loewenstein of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center reasoned that if sterile neutrinos really are dark matter, they would occasionally decay into ordinary matter, producing a lighter neutrino and an x-ray photon, and it would make sense to search for these x-rays wherever dark matter is found. Using the Chandra x-ray telescope, they observed a nearby dwarf galaxy thought to be rich in dark matter and found an intriguing bump of x-rays at just the right wavelength...
==endquote==
Kusenko and Lowenstein recently repeated their experiment using a different x-ray telescope--the XMM-Newton.
This type of neutrino is called "sterile" because even less apt to interact with other matter than ordinary neutrinos. Therefore even more difficult to detect. Because detection normally involves a particle undergoing some kind of reaction. In the case of sterile neutrinos (if they actually exist) detection is necessarily somewhat indirect as in the case of Kusenko Loewenstein.
The article mentioned other observations hinting indirectly at the conjectured existence of these squeaky clean neutrinos.
I couldn't find a recent journal publication about this, but here is something from a year ago by those two authors:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4055
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-whole-lot-of-nothing
If anyone can fill in details for us, or elaborate on points made in the short news article, please do.
==sample excerpt==
...
... Alexander Kusenko of the University of California, Los Angeles... and Michael Loewenstein of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center reasoned that if sterile neutrinos really are dark matter, they would occasionally decay into ordinary matter, producing a lighter neutrino and an x-ray photon, and it would make sense to search for these x-rays wherever dark matter is found. Using the Chandra x-ray telescope, they observed a nearby dwarf galaxy thought to be rich in dark matter and found an intriguing bump of x-rays at just the right wavelength...
==endquote==
Kusenko and Lowenstein recently repeated their experiment using a different x-ray telescope--the XMM-Newton.
This type of neutrino is called "sterile" because even less apt to interact with other matter than ordinary neutrinos. Therefore even more difficult to detect. Because detection normally involves a particle undergoing some kind of reaction. In the case of sterile neutrinos (if they actually exist) detection is necessarily somewhat indirect as in the case of Kusenko Loewenstein.
The article mentioned other observations hinting indirectly at the conjectured existence of these squeaky clean neutrinos.
I couldn't find a recent journal publication about this, but here is something from a year ago by those two authors:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4055
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