Franklin Instiute Awards
27 Apr 2007 2:59:30 UTC
Topic 192630
(moderation:
Sorry I have to brag, Arthur Macdonald, local boy just won this award. He is in good company allong with Einstein, Hawking, Bell and Edison
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
Franklin Instiute Awards
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That's some very good work, important work; tends to raise more questions than it answers:
How is energy conserved if the neutrino's mass changes?
What makes the proton so stable?
What keeps the neutrino's mass from oscillation when bound in atomic nuclei?
If neutrinos don't interact much, what are they doing in atomic nuclei in the first place? What keeps them bound there?
(edit) Or do neutrinos exist only as decay products from some nuclear interaction?
RE: RE: Sorry I have to
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Very good questions. It looks like the standard model needs a little work:)
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
See this article in the
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See this article in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue of CERN Courier:
neutrino astronomy
Tullio
Hmm... It's likely I shall
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Hmm... It's likely I shall never be able to decide on a 'favorite' aspect of science; it's amazing what's being learned just from the neutrino detector experiments. I don't think the Standard Model is in too much trouble; I read that it was only an assumption in the first place, that neutrinos should be massless, similar to the photon, and it's not too difficult to allow for them to have mass; of course, it gives different results for the interactions they're involved in (which would be via neutral currents [exchanging a Z boson] and the charged currents [exchanging a W boson] of the weak interactions).
It's the different set of eigenstates for the neutrino that is implied by a particle with mass, which thus leads to the calculable probability that the neutrino will oscillate between possible flavors (electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino) when the neutrino is in the vicinity of other matter (interacting with the electrons via the charged currents). It's been called the 'matter effect' (formally known as the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein effect).
I think that one of the best things about the neutrino (and all the various types of detectors) is the manner in which it can be used as 'probe' for learning about supernovae. As a matter of fact, they can be used to provide advanced warning of the next star that blows up in our 'neighborhood', since the neutrinos from the event will arrive quite some time before most of the electromagnetic signals (x-ray, UV, optical, IR, radio); just how much time is anyone's guess – one of the fascinating things to be learned. As far as cosmological 'probes' go, I think only the LIGOs and LISAs will be able to probe deeper... :)
The article that Tullio mentioned gives a good overview of how valuable the information from supernovae will be. There's some excellent news regarding this paragraph from it:
Just last month, using supercomputers ('extreme' crunching!) and the Standard Solar Model, they finally got a white dwarf to blow up on its own at the University of Chicago: Scientists Compute Death Throes of White Dwarf Star (includes a video of the simulation)
So now I'm wondering if a neutron is really a neutron, or is it a proton, electron, and neutrino that would otherwise go their separate ways in the absence of other matter?