neutrinos

A Few Items of Interest

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I was sent or came across a few interesting links that relate to things covered on this blog and/or of general scientific interest. It was announced yesterday that the European Physical Society 2013 High Energy Physics Prize was awarded to the collaboration of experimental physicists that operate the ATLAS and CMS experiments that discovered a … Read more

Possible Important Discovery at IceCube

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IceCube [here’s my own description of the experiment], the big high-energy neutrino experiment cleverly embedded into the ice at the South Pole, announced a very interesting result yesterday, following on an already interesting result from a few weeks ago, one that I failed to cover properly. They have seen the highest-energy neutrinos ever observed, ones that, unlike previously observed high-energy neutrinos, appear not to be generated by cosmic rays hitting the top of the atmosphere. Instead, they apparently come from new sources far out in space. And as such, it tentatively appears that they’ve opened up, as long anticipated, a new era in neutrino astronomy, in which high-energy neutrinos will be used to understand astrophysical phenomena!

[The only previous example of neutrinos being used in astrophysics occurred with the discovery of neutrinos from the relatively nearby supernova, visible with the naked eye, that occurred in 1987. But those neutrinos had energies millions of times smaller than the ones discussed here.  And there was hope that IceCube might see neutrinos specifically from gamma-ray bursts, including the one that occurred just two weeks ago; but that appears not to have happened.]

I don’t understand certain details well enough yet to give you a careful explanation — that will probably come next week — but here’s an early description (and expert readers are strongly encouraged to correct any errors.)

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Neutrinos From That Recent Gamma-Ray Burst?

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[NOTE ADDED: A reader forwarded a message that IceCube did not see any neutrinos with energies above 1 TeV = 1000 GeV from this GRB. Maybe this is not quite the final word (there would still be sensitivity, with some effort, to neutrinos in the 100 GeV – 1000 GeV range) but clearly the neutrino signal isn’t striking, and it is probably not there at all.  But as I’ve suggested below, even a non-observation might have significant implications for the science; the question is, how many neutrinos would the standard speculations about how GRB’s work have led you to expect at IceCube?  If a reader can provide that info, I’d appreciate that.]

The very recent report of a powerful and long-lived gamma-ray burst (GRB), and questions and remarks by my readers (thank you!), have motivated me, both as a scientist and a blogger, to try to understand whether we should have observed neutrinos from this GRB. This is forcing me to catch up on the related subjects of GRB’s, searches for high-energy neutrinos, and the highest-energy cosmic rays. I’m certainly not caught up yet; there are decades of research out there, and I’m quite far behind on developments over the past three or four years. But here are some of the basics that I believe I understand. Still, be cautious with the content of this post, both because I’m not an expert and because this is a very active area of research in which some fraction of the more speculative stuff will surely turn out to be wrong.   I will try to refine this post with a more detailed and corrected article sometime later, perhaps once we know whether neutrinos from this GRB were or were not observed.

GRBs that last more than a few seconds are widely believed to be associated with an exceptional form of Type II (or “core-collapse”) supernova, though this is not known for certain. In these types of GRBs, there are (at least) two sources of photons (everything from gamma-rays to visible light to radio waves) and two sources of neutrinos. It is important not to confuse the different sources!

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Tying Off Loose Ends

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Reminder: New York, Saturday June 16th at 2pm, I’ll be giving a public lecture (click here for details): THE EINSTEIN OBSESSION: SCIENCE, MYTH AND PUBLIC PERCEPTION. I’ve been doing a little work on my extra dimensions articles, adding one that describes how we know experimentally that the ordinary particles we’re made of (and most of … Read more

End of the OPERA Story

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In case you haven’t yet heard (check my previous post from this morning), neutrinos traveling 730 kilometers from the CERN laboratory to the Gran Sasso laboratory do arrive at the time Einstein’s special relativity predicts they would. Of course (as the press mostly seems to forget) we knew that.  We knew it because ICARUS already made … Read more

Guess What?! Neutrinos Travel Just Below the Speed of Light

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Five out of five experiments agree: neutrinos do not travel faster than the speed limit. Or more precisely: to within the uncertainties of current measurements, neutrino speed, for neutrinos with energies far larger than their masses, is experimentally indistinguishable from the speed of light in vacuum.  This is just as expected in standard Einsteinian special … Read more

A Neutrino Success Story

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Almost all the news on neutrinos in the mainstream press this past few months was about the OPERA experiment, and a possible violation of Einstein’s foundational theory of relativity. That the experiment turned out to be wrong didn’t surprise experts. But one of the concerns that scientists have about how this story turned out and was reported in the press is that perhaps many non-experts may get the impression that science is so full of mistakes that you can’t trust it at all. That would be a very unhappy conclusion — not just unhappy but in fact a very dangerous conclusion, at least for anyone who would like to keep their economy strong, their planet well-treated and their nation well-defended.

So it is important to balance the OPERA mini-fiasco with another hot-off-the-presses neutrino story that illustrates why, even though mistakes in individual scientific experiments are common, collective mistakes in science are rare. A discipline such as physics has intrinsic checks and balances that significantly reduce the probability of errors going unrecognized for long. In the story I’m about to relate, one can recognize how and why scientists start to come to consensus.  Though quite suspicious of any individual experiment, scientists generally take a different view of a group of experiments that buttress one another.

The context of this story, though much less revolutionary than a violation of Einstein’s speed limit, still represents a milestone in our understanding of neutrinos, which has been advancing very rapidly over the past fifteen years or so. When I was a starting graduate student in the late 1980s, almost all we knew about neutrinos was that there were at least three types and that they were much lighter than electrons, and perhaps massless. Today we know much, much more about neutrinos and how they behave. And in just the last few months and weeks and days, one of the missing entries in the Encyclopedia Neutrinica appears to have been filled in.

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Question to Laypersons: Your Views on the Neutrino Saga

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So, many of you have probably been following, to a greater or lesser degree, the story of the OPERA experiment.  This is the one that  found that neutrinos sent from the CERN lab near Geneva, Switzerland to the Gran Sasso lab in Italy (where OPERA is located)  arrived earlier than they expected.  Of course there were, from … Read more

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