Mutual transformation of different types of neutrinos. Free Technical Library News

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Mutual transformation of different types of neutrinos

08.10.2015

The very weak interaction of neutrinos with matter is well known. They can pass through the Earth or the Sun without disturbing a single atom. Moreover, they can pass through billions of stars in this way. On the one hand, this makes it difficult to register and measure their characteristics, and on the other hand, it makes them a source of the most important information about the evolution of the Universe and the processes occurring inside stars. Scientists also believe that neutrinos can play a key role in explaining the asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the Universe, which consists in the fact that after the Big Bang there was no complete mutual annihilation of matter and antimatter, and part of the matter still survived and formed our Universe.

One of the problems with neutrinos is the problem of their mass. For a long time it was assumed that the neutrino had no mass. This is how they were considered in the original version of the Standard Model. The solution of this question is important not only for understanding the physics of elementary particles. Neutrinos are generated by nuclear reactions occurring in the Universe, and after photons they are the most common particles in it. Their number is huge. More than 60 billion neutrinos pass through a square centimeter every second. So even with a very small own mass, the total mass of all neutrinos can be very large and can affect the evolution of the Universe. According to modern estimates, the mass of all neutrinos is approximately equal to the mass of all visible stars in the Universe.

Another problem arose in determining the number of electron neutrinos coming to Earth from the Sun. Since the 1970s, experiments have registered only one third of the number predicted by theory. This was called a deficit in the number of electron neutrinos. To explain the phenomenon, two dozen assumptions were put forward, of which the hypothesis of the so-called neutrino oscillations (oscillations) won. It assumed that electron neutrinos on their way from the Sun turned into other types of neutrinos that were not recorded in experiments. It is interesting that the idea of elementary particle oscillations was expressed by the Soviet academician Bruno Pontecorvo back in 1957. Neutrino oscillations were seriously discussed in the second half of the 1990s.

Currently, three types of neutrinos are known, each of which is always born together with the corresponding lepton - an electron, a muon or a tau lepton, from which they got their names. In accordance with the hypothesis of neutrino oscillations, a process of transformation of neutrinos into each other occurs periodically in time and space. So, in the beam, initially consisting only of electron neutrinos, as it propagates, an admixture of muon and tau neutrinos appears with a simultaneous decrease in the fraction of electron ones.

Curiously, the solution to this problem turned out to be related to the problem of the neutrino mass. The fact is that neutrino oscillations are possible only if they have masses.

The reason for this, according to modern concepts, is that the electron, muon and tau neutrinos are a quantum mixture of three states with different masses, each of which enters with its share. We can say that the electron, muon and tau neutrinos consist of three waves, each of which oscillates with its own frequency and amplitude. Therefore, if at the initial moment of time the sum of these waves looked like an electron neutrino, then after a while these waves will add up in such a way that an admixture of muon and tau neutrinos appears, which is measured by experimenters as a deficit in the number of electron neutrinos.

So physicists have long believed that neutrinos have mass, although it has not yet been directly measured. A corresponding slight modification of the formulas of the Standard Model was even made, which did not violate its essence. But experimental evidence of this was obtained at the turn of the 2015th and XNUMXst centuries. The XNUMX Nobel Prize winners Japanese Takaaki Kajita and Canadian Arthur McDonald were the key figures in the two major research groups that investigated neutrino oscillations.

In 1998, the results of Japanese scientists on the oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos, arising from the interaction of cosmic rays with the nuclei of atoms of atmospheric gases, obtained in the Super-Kamiokande experiment, were published. When a neutrino collides with a water molecule in the detector tank, a fast, electrically charged particle is born. It generates Cherenkov radiation, which is measured by light sensors. Its shape and intensity reveal the type of neutrino and where it came from. The muon neutrinos that came from above were more numerous than those that traveled the longer path across the globe. This shows that the muon neutrinos in the second case turned into other types of neutrinos.

In 2001, solar neutrino oscillations were proven at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO - Sudbury Neutrino Observatory). There, reactions between neutrinos and heavy water in the detector tank made it possible to measure the number of both electron neutrinos and all three types of neutrinos together. The number of electron neutrinos was found to be less than expected, while the total number of all three types of neutrinos together was in line with expectations. From this it followed that some of the electron neutrinos turned into other types of neutrinos.

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