Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the Second Edition
- Preface to the First Edition
- 1 The Atom Completed and a New Particle
- 2 The Muon and the Pion
- 3 Strangeness
- 4 Antibaryons
- 5 The Resonances
- 6 Weak Interactions
- 7 The Neutral Kaon System
- 8 The Structure of the Nucleon
- 9 The J/ψ, the τ, and Charm
- 10 Quarks, Gluons, and Jets
- 11 The Fifth Quark
- 12 From Neutral Currents to Weak Vector Bosons
- 13 Testing the Standard Model
- 14 The Top Quark
- 15 Mixing and CP Violation in Heavy Quark Mesons
- 16 Neutrino Masses and Oscillations
- 17 Epilogue
- Index
16 - Neutrino Masses and Oscillations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the Second Edition
- Preface to the First Edition
- 1 The Atom Completed and a New Particle
- 2 The Muon and the Pion
- 3 Strangeness
- 4 Antibaryons
- 5 The Resonances
- 6 Weak Interactions
- 7 The Neutral Kaon System
- 8 The Structure of the Nucleon
- 9 The J/ψ, the τ, and Charm
- 10 Quarks, Gluons, and Jets
- 11 The Fifth Quark
- 12 From Neutral Currents to Weak Vector Bosons
- 13 Testing the Standard Model
- 14 The Top Quark
- 15 Mixing and CP Violation in Heavy Quark Mesons
- 16 Neutrino Masses and Oscillations
- 17 Epilogue
- Index
Summary
The Old Enigma.
The most enigmatic of elementary particles, neutrinos were postulated in 1930, but were not observed until a quarter of a century later. It took another forty years to determine that they are not massless.
Neutrinos are a ubiquitous if imperceptible part of our environment. Neutrinos created in the Big Bang together with the cosmic background radiation pervade the entire Universe. The Sun is a poweful source of MeV neutrinos. Neutrinos in the GeV range are created when cosmic rays strike the atmosphere, 15 kilometers or so above the Earth's surface. Every nuclear reactor emits antineutrinos copiously. High-energy neutrinos are regularly produced at accelerators through particle decay and carefully fashioned magnetic fields can focus produced unstable charged particles to create neutrino beams.
Traditionally, efforts were made to set upper limits on the masses of the neutrinos associated with the electron, muon, and tau lepton. As explained in Chapter 6, if the electron neutrino were sufficiently massive the electron spectrum in tritium beta decay would be distorted near the end point. This prompted many painstaking measurements over the past thirty years. The expression for the spectrum actually depends on the square of the neutrino mass and the best fits can return unphysical, negative values for this.
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- Information
- The Experimental Foundations of Particle Physics , pp. 489 - 543Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009