The first time to accurately measure the energy of a Neutrino

Recently, a group of scientists conducted the MiniBooNE experiment at the Fermi Laboratory of the US Department of Energy announced a breakthrough discovery: confirming exactly the muon neutrino energy collided with the atom at the center. of their basic particle detectors.

This result has helped eliminate many things that are still uncertain when examining theoretical models of neutrino interaction and neutrino oscillation. New work was published in Physical Review Letters.

Joshua Spitz at the University of Michigan, along with Joseph Grange at the US Argonne National Laboratory, were co-researchers. Joshua Spitz said: ' The problem of neutrino energy is very important. It is hard to know about the energy of a neutrino and how much energy it has transferred to the atom that it collides with. This is the first study of the nucleus through neutrinos to achieve their goals. "

MinoBooNE detector surface can pick up light particles emitted when neutrino nuclear interaction.(Source: Sciencedaily.com).

To learn more about the nucleus, physicists fired particles at atoms and measured how they collided and scattered. If the energy of a particle is large enough, a nucleus it collides with may break, thus revealing information about the subatomic forces that bind the nuclei together. But to measure the right force, scientists need to know exactly the energy of the particle that has broken the atom. However, this is almost impossible when conducting experiments with neutrinos.

Because neutrinos have no charge, scientists do not have a 'filter' that allows them to select neutrinos with their own energy. However, scientists of MiniBooNE have come up with a special way to determine the energy of some muon neutrinos colliding with their detectors. They realized, the machine had kept some muon neutrinos with the exact energy of 236 million electronvolts (MeV).

Kaon particles carry energy that decays into muon neutrinos with energy chains. The trick is to identify muon neutrino particles that appear from the breakdown of kaon in a resting state. The law of conservation of energy and torque requires that all muon neutrinos appear from the resting kaon decay must have the correct energy of 236 MeV.

Richard Van De Water of Los Alamos National Laboratory, a spokesman for MiniBooNE, explains: 'In neutrino physics, you don't always know the neutrino energy is about to appear. With the first observation of the MiniBooNE on single-function muon neutrinos from kaon decay, we can study the interaction of charge currents with a known experiment that could allow theorists to improve models. their. This is an important work for future short and long-term neutrino programs in Fermilab ".

These analyzes have been linked to data collected from 2009-2011.

Spitz and colleagues are studying the results of the next single-function neutrino.MicroBooNE - the second neutrino detector placed near the MiniBooNE also receives muon neutrino from the NuMI absorber 102 meters away.

Because MicroBooNE uses liquid argon technology to record neutrino interactions, Spitz is optimistic that data from MicroBooNE will help provide more information - 'MicroBooNE will provide more accurate measurements of neutrinos that carry energy. . The results will be very valuable for future neutrino oscillation experiments ".