Word: electrons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Experimental evidence indicates that neutrinos come in three varieties: the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino. Solar fusion gives off the electron type. Bahcall and Bethe speculate that electron neutrinos change into the muon or tau versions somewhere between the sun and Earth. "It's as if they started out sweet," marvels Bethe, who won the Nobel Prize in 1967 for explaining how nuclear fusion powers the sun, "and then suddenly turned salty." Thus the Baksan experiment may have come up empty- handed because it was not designed to detect muon or tau neutrinos...
CAPTION: CERN's Large Electron-Positron Collider...
...basic "family" of particles is supplemented by two more exotic families, each of which has a parallel structure: two quarks, a type of electron and a type of neutrino. These two extra families are all but extinct in the modern universe, but they apparently existed in the searing heat of the Big Bang, and only accelerators can re-create them. In fact, all of the quarks in all of the families have been found or re-created -- except for the one called the top, which is believed to be the heaviest of all (its mass is at least 90 times...
There are no doubt plenty of frontiers left for CERN to push back. Though LEP does not appear to be powerful enough to find the top quark, the "clean" electron-positron collisions could reveal many other exotic phenomena. One long shot is the much-sought Higgs boson, named for British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, one of the first to recognize its importance. According to some theories, the Higgs boson is what gives all particles their mass. The idea is that everything in the universe is awash in a seaof Higgs bosons, and particles acquire their mass by swimming through this...
...physics. Superstring theory holds that every particle is really a vibrating loop of stringlike material that exists in ten-dimensional space (most of these dimensions are confined to such a small scale that we never notice them). Whether the string takes on the role of a quark or an electron or a Higgs boson depends simply on how it vibrates...