Word: muons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even so, the detection was indirect: what the physicists actually saw was flashes of light caused by fallout from rare but occasional collisions between neutrinos and water molecules. There were fewer flashes than expected from so-called muon neutrinos, suggesting that some of them had changed into another type, called tau neutrinos. Arcane theory dictates that neutrinos can't change form unless they have mass--though scientists can't say precisely what that mass...
...physicists eventually became intrigued with a third idea. Perhaps some electron neutrinos were switching identities, changing by a process called oscillation into muon or tau neutrinos (the two other varieties) en route to Earth. If so, existing detectors could never see them. And while some of the fine print in the laws of physics says that a massless neutrino can't change its stripes, a neutrino with even a tiny bit of mass might. If neutrinos have mass, they can change; conversely, if they can change, they must have mass, despite what textbooks have been saying for decades...
...ordinary matter, physicists had learned, was made of four basic particles: electrons, neutrinos and two kinds of quarks. But there was another family of particles, plentiful in the early universe but now found almost exclusively in nuclear accelerators, that seemed to be divided into the same four types: the muon (a sort of heavy electron), the muon neutrino and two more quarks. And in 1976, Stanford University physicist Martin Perl announced he had found a third, even heavier electron, which he dubbed the tau--a discovery that earned him the other half of this year's physics Nobel. Perl...
Brandenburg says the muon detector was but onecomponent of an all-purpose detector which about100 institutions were helping to construct...
Mann says a single university group wasill-equipped to design a detector alone. HarvardTufts and Brandeis Universities therefore sharedresources and formed the Boston Muon Consortium.Collaborators from the three universities had beenmeeting weekly at Harvard for the past three tofour years...