Have Neutrinos and Anti-Neutrinos Been Directly Proven to Exist in Experiments?

[aalfabob]

Hi, I've been trying to find information on neutrinos and the way that they are experimentally proven to exist. Most of the sites I've found state that neutrinos are indirectly proven to exist by experiments (conservation of energy, mass, etc.) Have there been any experiments that show direct proof of these particles existing, or is this a theoretical particle that could be mistaken for something else?

 

[jtbell]

What would you consider to be "direct proof?"

At particle accelerators like CERN and Fermilab, people have built devices that should produce neutrinos, according to currently-accepted theories. Nearby detectors record interactions with the characteristics that are expected of collisions of neutrinos with other particles such as protons and neutrons in nuclei, again according to currently-accepted theories.

Note that these theories don't cover just neutrinos. They relate the interactions of neutrinos to those of other particles and interactions which have been well-studied. In particular the "weak interaction" that neutrinos undergo is related ("unified") with the electromagnetic interaction via a theory developed by Weinberg and Salam in the late 1960s. They won the Nobel Prize for this theory, after its predictions were verified experimentally.

 

[malawi_glenn]

http://indico.cern.ch/tools/SSLPdisplay.py?stdate=2008-06-30&nbweeks=6

Lectures: 'Neutrino Physics'

Or pick up any particle physics textbook younger than year 2000.

Google: Neutrino, Neutrino detector, Neutrino experiments, Savannah River, Kamiokande

People even got Nobel Prizes for finding neutrinos :-)

 

[Vanadium 50]

JTBell askjs a good question. What would you accept as proof?

In addition to accelerator experiments, there are reactor and solar neutrinos. One can see the sun in neutrinos even when it's midnight and the entire Earth is between the source and the detector.

 

[aalfabob]

Would you say that the proof of neutrinos is on the same level as say the proof of electrons or even neutrons and that they are not being mistaken as something else? The reason I'm asking whether neutrinos existence or not is because I believe that a lot of theories in particle physics use "ghost" or unproven particles in order to fit the overall scheme better. Things such as extra dimensions and particles such as gravitons seem unnecessary to me, and I believe that effects which are a mystery to us may be due to other mechanical attributes of matter.

Over that past few years I've been working on a GUT based on the ideas of a more simple universe. My main approach is based on matter consisting of the compression and decompression of space, attributing to the forces of gravity, charges, and the strong force. The weak force is the only force which I have not been able to include into the overall theory as a property of matter, but rather a structural effect of atoms and matter.

 

[humanino]

Over that past few years I've been working on a GUT based on the ideas of a more simple universe. My main approach is based on matter consisting of the compression and decompression of space, attributing to the forces of gravity, charges, and the strong force. The weak force is the only force which I have not been able to include into the overall theory as a property of matter, but rather a structural effect of atoms and matter.

Many such GUT have been published, I mean those having difficulties with the weak sector. Did you even attempt to publish yours ?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Over that past few years I've been working on a GUT based on the ideas of a more simple universe.

And you will fail. I can tell that now. Why? Because the point of a theory is to explain observed phenomena (and, BTW, not necessarily to conform to your preconceptions). So the first step needs to be to learn what phenomena you are trying to explain.

It's probably also useful to learn what other attempts at a GUT have been made, and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

 

[aalfabob]

No how would I go about publishing it? I want to be able to share my theory with others so that it could be built upon or examined, but I want to do it in a way that I will receive credit for my works and so the credit for it is not stolen. It still needs a lot of work and I'm planning on using computer generated models to calculate things such as electron probabilities and how the weak force occurs by instability within my models. But i feel that my theory will be able to unify the other three forces and so far it seems that it has the possibility to do so.

 

[humanino]

It's probably also useful to learn what other attempts at a GUT have been made, and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

I should say I strongly agree with that.

No how would I go about publishing it?

As everybody else. Write down a paper, send it to your preferred journal, and you'll see what happens. If you have an interesting theory and you fail to share it with the rest of the world, it would be a terrible loss for knowledge. Here on PF you will not be able to get as much attention as you would get from a peer reviewed paper.

Otherwise, you can try to use the Independent Research subforum to discuss your theory. That could also give you a good step to prepare before trying to publish seriously.

 

[metalgirl2045]

They have been experimentally observed. You've probably been looking at the wrong experiments, neutrinos require enormous specialised detectors, and no particle detector designed for any other purpose bothers looking for them. At a collider, even if you did have a huge netrino detector around the collision point, the background would be so huge you'd never be able to say which were the neutrinos.

I can't remember who did first observe them, but I think it was looking at neutrinos from a nuclear reactor. Some famous experiments past, present and future which spring to mind (but in no particular order) looking at neutrinos include Homestake (Ray Davis), Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, Super Kamiokande, T2K, MINOS, CNGS. They can't all be wrong! They've been looking at quite specfic properties of neutrinos and getting useful results, a statistical fluke would not have caused these consistent results.

If you don't even know about neutrino experiments or how to get a paper published, you have to ask yourself whether you really know anywhere near enough to consider bettering current theory. The weak force has been proven to exist for many more reasons than neutrinos.

 

[malawi_glenn]

metalgirl2045, please watch your tone and language... You may be correct about what you are saying, but please, calm down :-)