3/1/2023 0 Comments Mass of neutrino![]() ![]() Once we began to understand how nuclear reactions powered the Sun, however, it became clear that the largest source of neutrinos on Earth wouldn’t be from the nuclear reactions that humans created, but from the Sun itself. Here, we see the construction of the tank used in the solar neutrino experiment in the Homestake gold mine from the 1960s. ![]() the years and decades since, we've detected neutrinos from the Sun, from cosmic rays, and even from supernovae. The neutrino was first proposed in 1930, but was not detected until 1956, from nuclear reactors. Proposed in 1930, Pauli’s wild theory was vindicated in 1956, when the first (anti)neutrino was detected from their production in nuclear reactors. When a muon decays to an electron, it must produce a muon neutrino and an anti-electron neutrino to conserve everything that’s required. When a neutron decays to a proton and an electron, it must also create an anti-electron neutrino, conserving both lepton number (the total number of leptons minus the total number of anti-leptons) and lepton family number (the same number of leptons minus anti-leptons in each of the electron, muon, and tau families). I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.Īccording to Pauli’s theory, there was a new class of particle that was emitted in certain nuclear reactions. He named it “neutrino,” which is Italian for “little neutral one,” and upon hypothesizing it, remarked upon the heresy he had committed: ![]() But Wolfgang Pauli had a different - arguably, even more radical - thought: that perhaps there was a novel type of particle being emitted in these decays, one that we simply didn’t yet have the capacity to see. Some, like Niels Bohr, had the radical suggestion that maybe energy and momentum weren’t really conserved maybe they could somehow be lost. ![]()
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