The great thing about neutrinos is that they are so weird—almost massless, loath to interact with other particles, prone to switch identities from one moment to the next. And their weirdness, if we could explain it, promises to expand our understanding of the physical world. The not-so-great thing about neutrinos is that they are difficult to study.

They interact so rarely with ordinary matter that physicists must erect giant detectors so that, eventually, one of the myriad neutrinos passing through will bump up against an atom in the detector. Often these experiments require deep underground locations to screen out cosmic-ray particles. Alternately, experimentalists can set up shop next to prodigious sources of neutrinos, such as nuclear reactors.

Take a tour of some of the intricate experiments (and their exotic locales) on the leading edge of neutrino physics in this slide show.

» View the Slide Show

2 Comments

1. 1. Eugene Sittampalam 04:28 PM 3/22/13

   "And their weirdness, if we could explain it, promises to expand our understanding of the physical world."
   In this context of the "weirdness" of the neutrino, which has a subatomic origin, the label is, in fact, applicable to the whole of quantum mechanics, with "bizarre" and "counterintuitive" thrown in for good measure to complement our understanding of 'modern' quantum mechanics.
   As the great Enrico Fermi once surmised, "There are two ways of doing calculations in theoretical physics; one way, and this is the way I prefer, is to have a clear physical picture of the process that you are calculating..." [see: A meeting with Enrico Fermi, Freeman Dyson (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Nature 427, 297 (2004)].
   In that context,to get a glimpse of that "clear physical picture" of the neutrino, and to make it short here, please be good enough to access (with your Internet Explorer browser): http://www.sittampalam.net/TheNeutrino.htm
   Thank you all for your time, and to Science for the space, here. Cheers!
   
   www.toe.tv

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2. 2. keyoung 05:53 PM 4/4/13

   
   Enjoyed the neutrino article in the April issue of the magazine. I just love reading about advances in our understanding of quantum and cosmic physics. I think what makes the field so interesting is that for everything we know (or think we know) there are just as many questions created about what we don’t know. (Not that I really understand any of it, but to me it is really fascinating stuff.)
   Shortly after reading the neutrino article I came up with a few questions that I hope might get answers or treatments in future articles in Scientific American. (Disclaimer: This list was composed on April 1)
   
   Does the Higgs boson possibly have have a heavier, hard to detect, family member. If so, could it be called the Higgsalino?
   
   And speaking of the HIggs, if the Higgs has a separate anti particle and a Higgs particle collided with an anti Higgs, would the two annihilate each other and cause any surrounding elementary particles to lose their mass?
   
   Could the “spooky action at a distance” effect be explained by a mediating entity known as the entanglon?
   
   Is it possible that the proposed sterile neutrino also comes with an anti particle, the fecund neutrino?
   
   And what about the extra dimensions that are predicted by string theory? What if they
   have their own particle zoos? If any have analogs in our own familiar dimensions, will the new particles have to be named like their partners but with a superscript attached: Such as the “muon neutrino, superscript 5” (for the m-neutrino member of the 5th dimension)?
   
   It has been proposed that WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) might be one of the constituents of dark matter. I don’t think the theorists agree on how massive these particles might be. So is it possible that the cosmic body that recently exploded over Russia was not a meteor but actually a single WIMP?
   
   Last question: Axions, monopoles, squarks, etc, etc. Do you have any medications to keep my head from spinning?
   

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