Neutrinos Essay

Nobel Prize In Neutrino Oscillations (2015)

In 2015, two separate groups of physicists on two separate sides of the globe, shared the Physics Nobel Prize for their “discovery of neutrino oscillations which demonstrate that neutrinos have mass”, thus opening a “new realm in particle physics”. Since the turn of the century, when compelling evidence supported the discovery that neutrinos seem to undergo metamorphosis, the research groups at the Super-Kamiokande Neutrino Observatory in Mt Kino Japan and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory located 2100m underground in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, lead by Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald, worked tirelessly looking deep into the earth for a little over half a decade waiting for the right moment to

Neutrinos are small lightweight subatomic particles that were postulated as being an electrically neutral particle that only interacts with matter through the weak sub atomic force and through gravity. The existence of the neutrino was first theorized in a letter that Wolfgang Pauli (an austrian physicist and Nobel Prize Laureate 1945) wrote in December of 1930, where in an attempt to uphold the conservation of beta decay he contemplated that “some energy is carried away by an electrically neutral, weakly interacting, and very light particle.” It would not be until the large scale creation of nuclear reactors, which were a constant source of neutrinos in great abundance, some 25 years after the theorization of this small particle that physicists would be able to confirm its existence. With its confirmation, it was discovered that neutrinos are everywhere, many were left over from the big bang but millions are being created everyday from various processes on earth, in the sun, and throughout the universe. Through the death of stars, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion neutrinos are constantly being released. In fact, neutrinos are the second most abundant particle in the entire universe, second only to the photon. If

Thus, the Standard Model, which relates the electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear force as well as all of the known subatomic particles, cannot be the “complete theory of how the fundamental constituents of the universe functions” because it requires that neutrinos are massless. This marks the beginning of a new era in particle physics, as the Standard Model had resisted experimental challenges and had been extremely successful for the last half