Neutrino Result Heralds New Chapter in Physics

upstart writes:

Neutrino result heralds new chapter in physics:

Current theories suggest that, shortly after the Big Bang, there were equal amounts of matter and its shadowy mirror-image anti-matter. However, when matter collides with anti-matter, they violently annihilate each other, releasing energy. If there were equal amounts in the early Universe, they should have cancelled each other out.

Instead, most of the Universe today is made of matter, with much smaller amounts of anti-matter.

Some scientists believe that, contained within the neutrino's flavour-changing, is the cosmic sleight-of-hand that enabled some matter to survive after the Big Bang and create the planets, stars and galaxies that make up the Universe.

In the 1990s, an experiment called the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector experiment at the US Department for Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico saw the production of more electron neutrinos than could be explained by the three-neutrino flavour-flipping theory. That result was confirmed by a separate experiment in 2002.

Physicists proposed the existence of a fourth flavour called the sterile neutrino. They believed this form of the particle could explain the over-production of electron neutrinos and, crucially, give an insight into why the particles change flavour.

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