![]() They can even pass through a lead barrier nine billion kilometers thick. These need to be refined, especially now that huge new detectors are being built, like the Hyper-Kamiokande, which is eight times bigger than the Super-Kamiokande and will cost over €500 million, and the US-based DUNE, a similar project based in a former gold mine in South Dakota, which is valued at more than €900 million. A new study, published in the science journal Nature on November 24, reveals that the simulations that use these models are plagued with imprecisions. These measurements, however, rely on theoretical models that predict the way neutrinos will interact with the nuclei of atoms. The changes observed in the composition and intensity of the neutrinos as they make this journey allow scientists to deduce their mysterious properties. Trillions of neutrinos pass through it without leaving a trace, but occasionally some collide with the material of a gigantic tank standing 41 meters high and filled with 50,000 tons of water. Scientists working on the project generated a beam of neutrinos in Tokai on Japan’s eastern coast and sent them to Kamioka, 295 kilometers away on the western side of the country to try and capture them at the Super-Kamiokande, a subterranean detector built in 1996 inside an old zinc mine. Megías is taking part in the T2K experiment, an audacious bid designed to investigate this metamorphosis. The discovery of this phenomenon earned Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics. They are chameleonic, which implies that they have mass, contrary to what was previously believed. He adds that the key may lie in so-called neutrino oscillation: these particles change their identity as they pass through space and can adopt three different types, or “lepton flavors” (electron, muon or tau). There is no antimatter in a pen or a table,” says Megías, who recently joined the University of Seville after spending two years at the University of Tokyo. We have evolved to a universe in which we are surrounded by matter. Many physicists, including 34-year-old Spaniard Guillermo Megías, believe the neutrino holds the answer. What happened after the Big Bang to allow matter to emerge victorious from its battle with antimatter? However, the reality is that antimatter represents less than 0.0000001% of the total matter in the universe. And, if that was the case, the matter and antimatter would have annihilated one another upon coming into contact, and the universe as we know it would not exist at all. The problem with the theory is that at the origin of the universe, the same amount of matter and antimatter – particles with the same mass, but with opposite values of electric charge – would have had to be formed. Expansion started with the Big Bang, around 13.7 billion years ago. The universe began with all its matter and energy concentrated in a point smaller than the full stop at the end of this sentence. ![]() More informationĪ newly discovered planetary system offers peek at the future after the Sun’s death They need to be fine-tuned for us to find out why we exist. But an international team of scientists revealed an unpleasant surprise on November 24: the simulations being used up until now are riddled with errors. Researchers believe some of the greatest secrets in the universe are hiding in these ghostly particles. The scientific community is spending hundreds of millions of euros on machines – like the Hyper-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Kamioka, Japan – to try and capture neutrinos to measure their properties with precision. And yet, they are elusive and extremely difficult to detect because they possess no electrical charge and have a mass of practically zero, millions of times inferior to that of an electron. Neutrinos are, along with light photons, the most abundant elementary particles in the universe. And another 65 billion would cross the tiny square every second. If a person takes a pen and draws on the palm of their hand a square measuring one centimeter on each side, this tiny surface area would immediately be traversed by 65 billion neutrinos, originating from the Sun’s nuclear reactions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |