Author: Emily Conover / Source: Science News
Pip-squeak particles called neutrinos are dishing out more than scientists had bargained for.
A particle detector has spotted a puzzling abundance of the lightweight subatomic particles and their antimatter partners, antineutrinos, physicists report May 30 at arXiv.
org. The finding mirrors a neutrino excess found more than two decades ago. And that match has researchers wondering if a new type of particle called a sterile neutrino — one even more shadowy than the famously elusive ordinary neutrinos — might be at large.Such a particle, if it exists, would transform the foundations of particle physics and could help solve cosmic puzzles like the existence of dark matter, an unidentified inert substance that makes up the preponderance of the matter in the universe.
The new study was conducted with a neutrino detector called MiniBooNE, while the previous neutrino excess was found with a different apparatus, the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector, which operated in the 1990s at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “We have two very different detectors … and we have the same results,” says MiniBooNE physicist En-Chuan Huang of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Hints of excess neutrinos have shown up in earlier results from MiniBooNE, which has been operating since 2002 at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill. But the new research includes twice as much data, making the neutrino deluge too strong to ignore.
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