Monday, May 15, 2023

Neutrino mass

I usually leave standard-model physics to other Coloradans, but as long as I'm just dumping mindthoughts without much original content, I stumbled into the question of neutrino mass.

By the Standard Model, neutrini have no mass; just momentum, like light. But light can be absorbed and detected. Neutrinos demand more effort for their detection. More effort than was initially thought: the Sun's neutrini weren't detected in amounts which the detectors liked. This formed the plot behind Clarke's very-own Currents of Space, namely Songs of Distant Earth.

It turns out that neutrini can shift after their output. That means they experience time. Remember Einstein? Yeah, if they experience time, they're not going at light speed so some of that momentum must be mass.

But what is that mass? Most particles like the lepton and baryons, electrons and neutrons and such, interact with the Higgs field. Apparently the neutrinos... don't. That is a massive (as it were) problem with the standard-model.

As to how to upgrade the standard-model, that's faaar beyond me, but for those interested here's a site. Also last year the KATRIN experiment at Karlsruhe had at least bounded the mass. They made tritium and let it decay. I suppose they could recoup some of the money by selling the Helium-3.

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