- #1
michealsmith
- 124
- 0
cann anyone tell me about tghe neutrino oscillation experimtent
arivero said:Short history: Georgi told the proton was to decay at a measurable probability, Japanese did big inversion money to build the detectors but no proton was detected to disintegrate. Then they turned the detectors into neutrino detectors and oscillation of neutrinos was detected! Big success because nobody had taken upon his shoulders the work of neutrino detection.
arivero said:Then they turned the detectors into neutrino detectors and oscillation of neutrinos was detected! Big success because nobody had taken upon his shoulders the work of neutrino detection.
jtbell said:Lots of accelerator experiments involving neutrinos had tried to detect neutrino oscillations as a sideline to their main work, but none had found any. I did a search like that as my PhD dissertation project.
The experiments that finally observed neutrino oscillations explored different energy and distance ranges, where the effects are easier to detect.
boy genius said:THE CLAIM
We claim the discovery of neutrino oscillations therefore mass. In short, we observe a deficit of muon neutrinos coming from greater distances and at lower energies, from their production by cosmic rays high in the atmosphere to the detector buried deep underground. The behaviour of this deficit as a function of energy and arrival angle tells us that muon neutrinos oscillate, which is to say that they alternatingly change from one type of neutrino to another as they travel at close to the speed of light.
Michael Mozina said:In other words, why couldn't the muon neutrinos simply be more apt to be absorbed or deflected by dense mass compared to the electron neutrino?
how does a neutrino "gain or lose mass" to change to a different type? Wouldn't a change of mass violate conservation of energy laws?
jtbell said:I haven't seen the detailed analysis of these experiments, but I'm sure it must include estimating what fraction of neutrinos of each type are absorbed while traveling through the earth, using neutrino interaction cross-sections predicted by the standard model (and studied experimentally) and current models of the Earth's structure.
Neutrino oscillations are not "mass oscillations." They are "flavor oscillations." The basic idea is that neutrinos of a particular flavor (e, mu or tau) do not have a single definite mass, but rather have certain probabilities of being three different masses. For each flavor, the possible masses are the same, but the probabilities are different.
According to a quantum-mechanical treatment of this system, if you create a neutrino of a particular flavor in a way that does not give you knowledge of which mass it has, its wavefunction is a superposition of the wavefunctions for all three masses. As the neutrino travels, the three wavefunctions in the superposition interfere with each other, giving oscillating probabilities for each of the three flavors. So when we detect it, it might be anyone of the three flavors. However, it has the same mass at production and at detection, chosen at random from one of the three possible values.
Michael Mozina said:I guess this concept is just hard for me to "wrap my head around". In the realm of photons, the mass of a photon does not vary, but it's wavelength changes, thus we have "high" and "low" energy photons. A photon however does not typically change energy states unless there is some kind of interaction with something else. If the 'mass' of a neutrino particle varies, how does one determine the energy state of the three types of neutrinos?
I suppose I'd feel a lot better if we could aim neutrinos at a detector and measure (detect) the fact that some of the neutrinos actually changed into another form of neutrino.
jtbell said:The mass of any particular individual neutrino is the same at production and at detection;
SpaceTiger said:Aren't the neutrinos generally in flavor eigenstates at production -- that is, not in a particular mass eigenstate?
jtbell said:We can't know which mass it is, without making extremely precise measurements of the energies and momenta of the other particles involved in the production and decay processes, which is impossible in practice.
jtbell said:But now suppose (hypothetically again) that we measure the energy and momentum of the outgoing muon very precisely. Together with our knowledge of the pion's energy and momentum, this determines the neutrino's energy and momentum. If we do this precisely enough, we can determine which mass the neutrino has.
SpaceTiger said:Isn't that why the existence of neutrino oscillations suggests flavor violation in the charged sector?
jtbell said:Remember, the mass of a particular single neutrino doesn't vary with time. Some neutrinos turn out to have one mass, some have another mass, and the rest have a third mass. The mass of any particular individual neutrino is the same at production and at detection; but the flavor at detection may be different from the flavor at production.
There are experiments in progress or in the works that are going to test this. They produce neutrinos of a specific type at an accelerator, then detect them far enough away so that oscillation effects should be significant.
In the meantime, there are results from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada that detects electron, muon and tau neutrinos from the sun. The sum of the three flavors agrees (within experimental statistical uncertainty) with predictions of the number of electron-neutrinos produced by the sun according to standard solar models.
Earlier solar-neutrino detectors detected only electron-neutrinos, and they found fewer neutrinos than the solar models predict. This was the long-standing "solar neutrino puzzle" which has now apparently been resolved.
jtbell said:I don't remember reading about that. Do you have a reference?
Michael Mozina said:I have another rather basic question about the current neutrino experiments.
No matter how I try to rationalize the method, I cannot logically understand how a "missing" neutrino can be considered evidence of a "changed" neutrino.
In other words, the very methods we use to detect and observe neutrinos are based upon the QM principles of scattering and absortion of neutrinos. It therefore seems very probable that a "missing" neutrino may simply have been absorbed or scattered somewhere between the transmitter and the detector. Since we can't rule out scattering/absortion proceess, I fail to understand how a "missing" neutrino can logically be equated to evidence of "flavor changing" neutrinos. Can someone explain the logic of how and why missing neturinos are interpreted to have changed flavor rather than simply being absorbed or scattered along the way? Try as I might, I just cannot understand how absorbtion and scattering were ruled out as a cause of these missing neutrinos, or why a "flavor change" is considered to be a superior explanation for these missing neutrinos.
Michael Mozina said:In other words, the very methods we use to detect and observe neutrinos are based upon the QM principles of scattering and absortion of neutrinos. It therefore seems very probable that a "missing" neutrino may simply have been absorbed or scattered somewhere between the transmitter and the detector. Since we can't rule out scattering/absortion proceess, I fail to understand how a "missing" neutrino can logically be equated to evidence of "flavor changing" neutrinos.
Michael Mozina said:I guess my resistance is to the notion that it changes flavors in flight as something intrinsic to the neutrino itself. I can more easily relate to a "change" that occurred in the solar atmosphere to change it from one energy state to another (like a wavelength change) but I less easily relate to assigning different neutrinos different masses and believing that the neutrino just waffles inbetween energy states for purely internal reasons.
selfAdjoint said:The original Homestake detector could only respond to neutrinos of the electron type. The Solar models predicted a certain flux of electron neutrinos. Homestake only detected a third as many neutrinos as predicted. This is the "missing neurinos". The modern explanations is that the predicted flux of electron neutrinos leaves the Sun but along the way to Earth they oscillate between electron, mu, and tau types and by the time they reach the detector they are in a steady state of equal numbers in each type, so only a third of the original number in the electron type that the detector saw.
Michael Mozina said:I suppose I am still a bit "uncomfortable" with the assumption that the flavor change is primarly a function of "time" and "distance" (assuming that I'm following your logic properly), rather than being in some way related to the medium in which the neutrino travels. Even still, I think I at least have a better understanding of the theory that flavor change is internal to the neutrino. I very much appreciate your time and effort to educate me a bit.
Would it be fair then to suggest that we should expect X amount of every type of neutrino based solely on "distance" and "time", or are you suggesting there is also an external influence involved in the transition process? In other words, if the neutrinos passed through a pure vacuum (assuming such a thing existed), would they be received as three different flavors after traveling a specific distance and length of time with no external interactions until reaching the detector?
New experimental evidence from the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector in Japan represents the strongest evidence to date that the mass of the neutrino is non-zero. Models of atmospheric cosmic ray interactions suggest twice as many muon neutrinos as electron neutrinos, but the measured ratio was only 1.3:1. The interpretation of the data suggested a mass difference between electron and muon neutrinos of 0.03 to 0.1 eV. Presuming that the muon neutrino would be much more massive than the electron neutrino, then this implies a muon neutrino mass upper bound of about 0.1 eV.
Michael Mozina said:If the Leptons are different scales in size, and there is a presumed mass difference between the various neutrinos, aren't we back to violating the conservation of energy laws by claiming they change mid flight from one rest mass state to another,
but also aren't we violating the conservation of Leptons rule by having them "change" as well?
Yes, neutrino oscillations "break" the concept of separate conservation of the individual lepton numbers (electron number, muon number and tau number, if you like).
Michael Mozina said:As I said earlier, it is not as through we have observed this transformation under controlled conditions.
Sending a high-intensity beam of muon neutrinos from the lab's site in Batavia, Illinois, to a particle detector in Soudan, Minnesota, scientists observed the disappearance of a significant fraction of these neutrinos. The observation is consistent with an effect known as neutrino oscillation, in which neutrinos change from one kind to another.