An international team of researchers has proposed an ambitious new experiment that would involve firing neutrinos from a particle accelerat...
An international team of researchers has proposed an ambitious new experiment that would involve firing neutrinos from a particle accelerator in Russia to a detector 2500 km away in the Mediterranean Sea. The researchers claim that the facility would provide unparalleled insights into the properties of neutrinos and elucidate the mystery of why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe.
Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are created in huge numbers by cosmic sources but can also be produced by nuclear reactors and particle accelerators. As they interact only weakly with matter they are difficult to detect. There are currently three known types of neutrino that can oscillate between their different “flavours” as they travel. It was long believed that neutrinos have no mass, but we now know that they have one of three tiny, discrete masses. Yet scientists have not yet been able to determine the relative ordering of the three neutrino masses as well as discover the extent to which neutrinos violate charge-parity symmetry — a finding that could help to understand why the universe is dominated by matter rather than antimatter.
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