Neutrino oscillation observed, and other interesting results

[unixronin]

In case anyone missed it (it really hasn't hit the non-scientific news in a big way, which isn't that surprising), the OPERA experiment at Gran Sasso National Laboratory, Italy has detected — with 98% confidence, they say — a tau neutrino in a beam of muon neutrinos fired from CERN, roughly 732km away.

Well, so what?  One tau neutrino among billions of muon neutrinos.  No big deal, right?  Everyone makes mistakes?

Well, here's why it's a big deal:  The originating beam from CERN is known to contain solely muon neutrinos, because the process that creates the beam can emit only muon neutrinos.  This means that in only 732km, a trip lasting 2.4 milliseconds, one of those muon neutrinos changed into a tau neutrino.  And that's important because it means that neutrinos, long believed to be massless, must in fact possess rest mass, be it ever so tiny a mass.

And that may not sound like a lot, but believe me, it's a lot more important than it sounds — not least because it's another datum that means the Standard Model of particle physics is, at best, incomplete, because the Standard Model as it currently exists does not allow the possibility of neutrinos having rest mass.  This is at least the third recent major result to throw serious doubt upon the Standard Model.  (Others include the recent result showing significant matter/antimatter asymmetry from the DZero experiment at Fermilab's Tevatron facility, and the Brookhaven muon (g-2)experiment to measure the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, which yielded a result 2.6 standard deviations outside the range possible under the Standard Model.  This latter result also possibly presents experimental evidence in support of the theory of supersymmetry.)

It's an interesting footnote that from the day they began drawing up the blueprints for GSNL, the precise location and alignment of the laboratory were chosen specifically to facilitate constructing this experiment.

Comments

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Every time a physicist declares that "we are on the verge of a complete understanding of physical reality," something like this comes along to a) show he didn't know what he was talking about and b) show that we are on the verge of a better, if incomplete, understanding of reality. This leaves things interesting, something I like because I love puzzles, and thus science, and would hate it if we ran out of such mysteries.

Some wonder if our universe is nothing but a hologram projected into 3/4-D space from a higher-order space by some prankish high school student, just to see what the little bugs will do if he twiddles the knobs on their enclosure. Or maybe it's hologrammatic, but quite natural. Either way, maybe that accounts for the strange stuff that keeps happening.

I don't think so. Maybe it is hologrammatic, however it came to be, but the strange stuff keeps happening because we are, after all, mortals who don't know everything (even if we want to believe we do, or can), so we have to keep looking into this corner and that corner of reality to see what's going on there, which is why we keep running into things like this.

Anyway, as they say, damn interesting (http://www.damninteresting.com/). :-)