Recently, a team of scientists conducting the MiniBooNE experiment at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi Laboratory announced a groundbreaking discovery: confirming the exact energy muon neutrinos collide with the atom at the center. of their elementary particle detector.
This result eliminates many uncertainties when testing theoretical models of neutrino interactions and neutrino oscillations. The new work is published in Physical Review Letters.
Joshua Spitz at the University of Michigan, along with Joseph Grange at the US Argonne National Laboratory, are co-leaders of the study. Joshua Spitz said: “ The problem of neutrino energy is very important. One can hardly know the energy of a neutrino and how much energy it has transferred to the atom it collides with. This is the first time that nuclear research through neutrinos has achieved its goal.”
The surface of the MinoBooNE detector pool can pick up light particles emitted when neutrinos interact with the nucleus. (Source: Sciencedaily.com).
To learn more about nuclei, physicists shot particles at atoms and measured how they collide and scatter. If the energy of a particle is large enough, a nucleus that is hit by it can break apart, thus revealing information about the subatomic forces that hold nuclei together. But to properly measure the force, scientists need to know the exact energy of the particle that broke the atom. However, this is almost impossible when performing experiments with neutrinos.
Since neutrinos have no electrical charge, scientists don’t have a “filter” that allows them to select neutrinos with specific energies. Even so, the MiniBooNE scientists came up with a special way to determine the energies of several muon neutrinos colliding with their detector. They found that the machine had retained a number of muon neutrinos with energies of exactly 236 million electronvolts (MeV).
Energy-carrying Kaon particles have decayed into muon neutrinos with an energy series. The trick here is identifying the muon neutrinos that emerge from the decay of kaons at rest. The law of conservation of energy and torque requires that all muon neutrinos that emerge from resting kaon decay must have an energy of exactly 236 MeV.
Richard Van De Water of Los Alamos National Laboratory, a spokesman for MiniBooNE, explains: “In neutrino physics, you don’t always know the energy of the neutrino that is about to emerge. With MiniBooNE’s first observation of a single-energy muon neutrino from kaon decay, we can study the interaction of charge flow with a known experiment that could allow theorists to improve models. their. This is an important work for future short- and long-term neutrino programs at Fermilab.”
These analyzes were connected to data collected from 2009-2011.
Spitz and colleagues are studying the results of the next single-energy neutrino. MicroBooNE – the second neutrino detector located near MiniBooNE also received muon neutrinos from the NuMI absorber 102 meters away.
Because MicroBooNE uses liquid argon technology to record neutrino interactions, Spitz is optimistic that the data from MicroBooNE will help provide even more information – “MicroBooNE will provide even more precise measurements of energetic neutrinos. . The results will be very valuable for future neutrino oscillation experiments.”