Word: neutrino
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...have turned up disappointingly few flickers at the outer edges of the Milky Way (but surprisingly many toward the galaxy's core). The latest teaser came last month when news leaked out that researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory had seen evidence for what could be a slightly massive neutrino...
...confidence physicists have placed in the so-called Standard Model, a powerful theoretical edifice that has reduced a once bewildering array of subatomic particles to just a few fundamental constituents. These include three pairs of light particles known as leptons, of which the negatively charged electron and chargeless neutrino are the most familiar, and three pairs of heavier particles known by the whimsical name of quarks. "Up" and "down" quarks combine to create protons and neutrons, the components of everyday matter, while "charm" and "strange" quarks conspire to make more exotic particles, the sort produced in deep space by quasars...
Instead of joining the LHC like otherprofessors hope to, Mann says he intends toexplore areas unrelated to particle accelerators,such as neutrino astrophysics and nucleon decay.Mann recognizes that these areas have lesspotential for yielding a break through, but sayshe prefers not having to travel constantly to andfrom Europe...
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...
Finding any kind of neutrino is a neat trick. The Baksan detector consists of four tanks filled with 30 tons of the element gallium, which liquefies at about room temperature. If a solar neutrino of the right energy interacts with the material in the tanks, a feat of atomic alchemy will transmute some of the gallium into germanium, another metallic element...