Could Misbehaving Neutrinos Explain Why the Universe Exists?
Could Misbehaving Neutrinos Explain Why the Universe Exists?
Scientists delight in exploring mysteries, and the greater the mystery, the greater the enthusiasm. There are many unanswered questions in science, but when you go big, it's hard to beat "Why is there something, instead of nothing?"
It may seem a philosophical question, but it is very susceptible to scientific research. Put a little more concretely, "Why is the universe made of the kinds of matter that make human life possible so that we can even ask this question?" Scientists doing research in Japan have announced a measure Last month it directly addresses the most fascinating of queries. It seems that his measure does not agree with the simplest expectations of the current theory and could point towards an answer to this timeless question.
Its measure seems to say that for a particular set of subatomic particles, matter and antimatter act differently.
Matter v. Antimatter
Using the J-PARC The accelerators, located in Tokai, Japan, launched a beam of ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos and their anti-matter counterparts (antineutrinos) through the Earth to the Super Kamiokande experiment, located in Kamioka, also in Japan. This experiment, called T2K (Tokai to Kamiokande), is designed to determine why our universe is made of matter. A peculiar behavior exhibited by neutrinos, called neutrino oscillation, could shed some light on this annoying problem.
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Asking why the universe is made of matter It may sound like a peculiar question, but there is a very good reason why scientists are surprised by this. It is because, in addition to knowing the existence of matter, scientists also know antimatter.
In 1928, the British physicist Paul Dirac proposed the existence of antimatter - An antagonistic brother of the subject. Combine equal amounts of matter and antimatter and both annihilate each other, resulting in the release of an enormous amount of energy. And, because the principles of physics usually work equally well in reverse, if it has a prodigious amount of energy, it can be converted into exactly equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Antimatter was discovered in 1932 by the American Carl Anderson and researchers have had almost a century to study its properties.
However, that phrase "in exactly equal quantities" is the crux of the enigma. In the brief moments immediately after the big Bang, the universe was full of energy. As it expanded and cooled, that energy should have become equal parts of matter and subatomic particles of antimatter, which should be observable today. And yet, our universe is composed essentially of matter. How can it be?
By counting the number of atoms in the universe and comparing that with the amount of energy we see, scientists determined that "exactly the same" is not entirely correct. Somehow, when the universe was a tenth of one trillionth of a second old, the laws of nature deviated slightly in the direction of matter. For every 3,000,000,000 particles of antimatter, there were 3,000,000,001 particles of matter. The 3 billion particles of matter and the 3 billion particles of antimatter were combined and annihilated again in energy, leaving the slight excess of matter to form the universe we see today.
Since this enigma was understood almost a century ago, researchers have been studying matter and antimatter to see if they can find a behavior in subatomic particles that explains the excess of matter. They trust that matter and antimatter are produced in equal quantities, but they have also observed that a class of subatomic particles called quarks exhibit behaviors that slightly favor the matter over antimatter. That particular measure was subtle, involving a class of particles called K mesons that can be converted from matter to antimatter and vice versa. But there is a slight difference in the conversion of matter to antimatter compared to the opposite. This phenomenon was unexpected and its discovery led to the 1980 Nobel Prize, but the magnitude of the effect was not enough to explain why matter dominates our universe.
Ghost beams
Thus, scientists have focused their attention on neutrinos, to see if their behavior can explain the excess of matter. Neutrinos are the ghosts of the subatomic world. Interacting only through the weak nuclear force, they can pass through matter without interacting almost at all. To give a sense of scale, neutrinos are most commonly created in nuclear reactions and the largest nuclear reactor around is the Sun. Protecting yourself from half of the solar neutrinos would take a mass of solid lead about 5 light-years deep. Neutrinos do not really interact much.
Between 1998 and 2001, a series of experiments, one with the Super Kamiokande detector and another with the detector SNO detector in Sudbury, Ontario, definitively demonstrated that neutrinos also exhibit other surprising behavior. They change their identity.
Physicists know three different types of neutrinos, each associated with a single subatomic brother, called electrons, muons, and taus. Electrons are what cause electricity and the particles of muon and tau are very similar to electrons, but heavier and unstable.
The three types of neutrinos, called electronic neutrinos, muon neutrinos and neutrino tau, can "transform" into other types of neutrinos and vice versa. This behavior is called neutrino oscillation.
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The oscillation of neutrinos is a unique quantum phenomenon, but it is more or less analogous to starting with a bowl of vanilla ice cream and, after going to look for a spoon, you find again that the bowl is half vanilla and half chocolate. Neutrinos change their identity from being entirely of one type, to a mixture of types, to a completely different type, and then they return to the original type.
Antineutrino oscillations
Neutrinos are particles of matter, but antimatter neutrinos, called antineutrinos, also exist. And that leads to a very important question. Neutrinos oscillate, but do antineutrinos also oscillate and oscillate in exactly the same way as neutrinos? The answer to the first question is yes, while the answer to the second question is not known.
Let's consider this a little more thoroughly, but in a simplified way: suppose there are only two types of neutrinos: muon and electron. Suppose further that you have a beam of neutrinos of the purely muonic type. Neutrinos oscillate at a specific speed and, as they move by The speed of light, they oscillate depending on the distance from where they were created. Therefore, a beam of pure muon neutrinos will look like a mixture of muon types and electrons at a distance, then pure electron types at another distance and then it will return only to the muons. Antimatter neutrinos do the same.
However, if matter and antimatter neutrinos oscillate at slightly different rates, you would expect that if you were at a fixed distance from the point at which a beam of pure muon neutrinos or antineutrinos muons was created, then in the case of neutrinos you would see a mixture of neutrinos of muons and electrons, but in the case of neutrinos of antimatter, I would see a different mixture of neutrinos of muons and electrons of antimatter. The actual situation is complicated by the fact that there are three types of neutrinos and the oscillation depends on the energy of the beam, but these are the big ideas.
The observation of different oscillation frequencies by neutrinos and antineutrinos would be an important step towards understanding the fact that the universe is made of matter. It is not all history, because new additional phenomena must also be maintained, but the difference between matter and antimatter neutrinos is necessary to explain why there is more matter in the universe.
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In the current theory that describes the interactions of neutrinos, there is a variable that is sensitive to the possibility that neutrinos and antineutrinos oscillate differently. If that variable is zero, the two types of particles oscillate at identical speeds; If that variable differs from zero, the two types of particles oscillate differently.
When T2K measures this variable, found that it was inconsistent with the hypothesis that neutrinos and antineutrinos oscillate identically. A little more technically, they determined a range of possible values for this variable. There is a 95 percent chance that the true value of that variable is within that range and only 5 percent of the true variable is outside that range. The "no difference" hypothesis is outside the 95 percent range.
In simpler terms, the current measurement suggests that neutrinos and antimatter antimatter oscillate differently, although the certainty does not rise to the level to make a definitive statement. In fact, critics point out that measurements with this level of statistical significance should be considered very, very skeptical. But it is undoubtedly an enormously provocative initial result, and the global scientific community is extremely interested in seeing improved and more accurate studies.
The T2K experiment will continue to record additional data in hopes of making a definitive measurement, but it is not the only game in the city. TO Fermilab, located outside of Chicago, a similar experiment called NEW STAR is firing neutrinos and antimatter neutrinos north of Minnesota, hoping to beat T2K at the stroke. And, looking further into the future, Fermilab is working hard on what will be his star experiment, called DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment), which will have much higher capabilities to study this important phenomenon.
While the result of T2K is not definitive and caution is required, it is certainly tempting. Given the enormity of the question of why our universe seems not to have an appreciable antimatter, the scientific community of the world will avidly await further updates.
Originally published in Living science.
Don Lincoln is a physics researcher in Fermilab. He is the author of "The Large Hadron Collider: The extraordinary story of the Higgs Boson and other things that will blow your mind"(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), and produces a series of scientific education. videos. SIGUELO on Facebook. The opinions expressed in this comment are yours.
Don Lincoln contributed this article to Live Science's Voices of experts: Op-Ed & Insights.
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