We’ve met neutrinos before, when talking about supernova 1987A.
Historically, the early quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli first proposed the existence of the neutrino in 1930, to explain a problem with then-current understanding of radioactive beta decay. In beta decay, an atomic nucleus emits an electron, which has a negative electric charge, and the resulting nucleus increases in positive charge, transmuting into the element with the next highest atomic number. The law of conservation of energy applied to this nuclear reaction implied that the electron should be emitted from any given isotope with a specific energy, balancing the change in mass as given by Einstein’s famous E = mc2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared). Alpha particles emitted during alpha decay, and gamma rays emitted during gamma decay appear at fixed energies.
However, this was not what was observed for beta decay electrons. The ejected electrons had a maximum energy as predicted, but also appeared with a spread of lower energies. Pauli suggested that another particle was involved in the beta decay reaction, which carried off some of the energy. In a three-body reaction, the energy could be split between the electron and the new particle in a continuous fashion, thus explaining the spread of electron energies. Pauli suggested the new particle must be very light, so as to evade detection up to that time. He called it a “neutron”, a neutral particle following the word-ending convention of electron and proton.
However, in the same year German physicists Walther Bothe and Herbert Becker produced some strange radiation by bombarding light elements with alpha particles from radioactive polonium. This radiation had properties unlike other forms known at the time, and several experimenters tried to understand it. In 1932, James Chadwick performed experiments that demonstrated the radiation was made of neutral particles of about the same mass as a proton. The name “neutron” had been floating around nuclear physics for some time (Pauli wasn’t the first to use it; “neutron” appears in the literature as a name for proposed hypothetical neutral particles as early as 1899), but Chadwick was the first experimenter to demonstrate the existence of a neutral particle, so the name got attached to his discovery. Italian physicist Enrico Fermi responded by referring to Pauli’s proposed very light neutral particle as a “neutrino”, or “little neutron” in Italian coinage.
Detection of the neutrino had to wait until 1956, when a sensitive enough experiment could be performed, by American physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines, for which Reines received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics (Cowan had unfortunately died in 1974). In 1962, Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, and Jack Steinberger of Fermilab discovered that muons—particles similar to electrons but with more mass—had their own associated neutrinos, distinct from electron neutrinos. They received the Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1988 (only a 26 year wait, unlike Reines’ 39 year wait). Finally, Martin Perl discovered a third, even more massive electron-like particle, named the tau lepton, in 1975, for which he shared that 1995 Prize with Reines. The tau lepton, like the electron and muon, has its own distinct associated neutrino.
Meanwhile, other researchers had been building neutrino detectors to observe neutrinos emitted by the sun’s nuclear reactions. Neutrinos interact only extremely weakly with matter, so although approximately 7×1014 solar neutrinos hit every square metre of Earth every second, almost none of them affect anything, and in fact almost all of them pass straight through the Earth and continue into space without stopping. To detect neutrinos you need a large volume of transparent material; water is usually used. Occasionally one neutrino of the trillions that pass through every second will interact, causing a single-atom nuclear reaction that produces a brief flash of light, which can then be seen by light detectors positioned around the periphery of the transparent material.
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When various solar neutrino detectors were turned on, there was a problem. They detected only about one third to one half of the number of neutrinos expected from models of how the sun works. The physics was thought to be well understood, so there was great trouble trying to reconcile the observations with theory. One of the least “break everything else we know about nuclear physics” proposals was that perhaps neutrinos could spontaneously and randomly change flavour, converting between electron, muon, and tau neutrinos. The neutrino detectors could only detect electron neutrinos, so if the neutrinos generated by the sun could change flavour (a process known as neutrino oscillation) during the time it took them to arrive at Earth, the result would be a roughly equal mix of the three flavours, so the detectors would only see about a third of them.
Another unanswered question about neutrinos was whether they had mass or not. Neutrinos have only ever been detected travelling at speeds so close to the speed of light that we weren’t sure if they were travelling at the speed of light (in which case they must be massless, like photons) or just a tiny fraction below it (in which case they must have a non-zero mass). Even the neutrinos detected from supernova 1987A, 168,000 light years away, arrived before the initial light pulse from the explosion (because the neutrinos passed immediately out of the star’s core, while the light had to contend with thousands of kilometres of opaque gas before being released), so we weren’t sure if they were travelling at the speed of light or just very close to it. Interestingly, the mass of neutrinos is tied to whether they can change flavour: if neutrinos are massless, then they can’t change flavour, whereas if they have mass, then they must be able to change flavour.
To test these properties, particle physicists began performing experiments to see if neutrinos could change flavour. To do this, you need to produce some neutrinos and then measure them a bit later to see if you can detect any that have changed flavour. But because neutrinos move at very close to the speed of light, you can’t detect them at the same place you create them; you need to have your detector a long way away. Preferably hundreds of kilometres or more.
The first such experiment was the KEK to Kamioka, or K2K experiment, running from 1999-2004. This involved the Japanese KEK laboratory in Tsukuba generating a beam of muon neutrinos and aiming the beam at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector at Kamioka, a distance of 250 kilometres away.
The map is from the official website of KEK. Notice that Super-Kamiokande is on the other side of a mountain range from KEK. But this doesn’t matter, because neutrinos travel straight through solid matter! Interestingly, here’s another view of the neutrino path from the KEK website:
You can see that the neutrino beam passes underneath the mountains from KEK to the underground location of the Super-Kamiokande detector, in a mine 1000 metres below Mount Ikeno (altitude 1360 m). KEK at Tsukuba is at an altitude of 35 m. Now because of the curvature of the Earth, the neutrino beam passes in a straight line 1000 m below sea level at its middle point. With the radius of the Earth 6367 km, Pythagoras’ theorem tells us that the centre of the beam path is 6365.8 km from the centre of the Earth, so 1200 m below the mean altitude of KEK and Super-Kamiokande – the maths works out. Importantly, the neutrino beam cannot be fired horizontally, it has to be aimed at an angle of about 0.5° into the ground for it to emerge correctly at Super-Kamiokande.
The K2K experiment succeeded in detecting a loss of muon neutrinos, establishing that some of them were oscillating into other neutrino flavours.
A follow up experiment, MINOS, began in 2005, this time using a neutrino beam generated at Fermilab in Illinois, firing at a detector located in the Soudan Mine in Minnesota, some 735 km away.
In this case, the straight line neutrino path passes 10 km below the surface of the Earth, requiring the beam to be aimed downwards at an angle of 1.6° in order to successfully reach the detector. Another thing that MINOS did was to measure the time of flight of the neutrino beam between Fermilab and Soudan. When they sent a pulsed beam and measured the time taken for the pulse to arrive at Soudan, then divided it by the distance, they concluded that the speed of the neutrinos was between 0.999976 and 1.000126 times the speed of light, which is consistent with them not violating special relativity by exceeding the speed of light[3].
If you measure the distance from Fermilab to Soudan along the curvature of the Earth, as you would do for normal means of travel (or if the Earth were flat), you get a distance about 410 metres (or 0.06%) longer than the straight line distance through the Earth that the neutrinos took. If the scientists had used that distance, then their neutrino speed measurements would have given values 0.06% higher: 1.00053 to 1.00068 times the speed of light. In other words, to get a result that doesn’t violate known laws of physics, you have to take account of the fact that the Earth is spherical, and not flat.
This result has been reproduced with reduced uncertainty bounds by the CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso (CNGS) experiment in Europe, which fires a neutrino beam from CERN in Switzerland to the OPERA detector at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy.
The difference between the neutrino travel times and the speed of light over the 732 km beam path was measured to be -1.9±3.7 nanoseconds, consistent with zero difference[5]. In this case, if a flat Earth model had been used, the beam path distance would be equal to the surface distance from CERN to Gran Sasso, again about 410 metres longer. This would have given the neutrino travel time difference to be an extra 410/c = 1370 ns, making the neutrinos travel significantly faster than the speed of light.
All of these experiments have shown that neutrino oscillation does occur, which means neutrinos have a non-zero mass. But we still don’t know what that mass is. It must be small enough that for all our existing experiments we can’t detect any any difference between the neutrino speed and the speed of light. More experiments are underway to try and pin down the nature of these elusive particles.
But importantly for our purposes, these neutrino beam experiments make no sense if the Earth is flat, and can only be interpreted correctly because we know the Earth is a globe.
References:
[1] “Long Baseline neutrino oscillation experiment, from KEK to Kamioka (K2K)”. KEK website. http://neutrino.kek.jp/intro/ (accessed 2019-10-01.)
[2] Louis, W. C. “Viewpoint: The antineutrino vanishes differently”. Physics, 4, p. 54, 2011. https://physics.aps.org/articles/v4/54
[3] MINOS collaboration, Adamson, P. et al. “Measurement of neutrino velocity with the MINOS detectors and NuMI neutrino beam”. Physical Review D, 76, p. 072005, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.76.072005
[4] “Old accelerators image gallery”. CERN. https://home.cern/resources/image/accelerators/old-accelerators-images-gallery (accessed 2019-10-01).
[5] The OPERA collaboration, Adam, T., Agafonova, N. et al. “Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam”. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2012, p. 93, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2012)093
Fascinating. This has what I consider the hallmark of great science writing (for the public): I knew almost everything you posted except details (names of physicists and experiments, mostly).
Nevertheless, this was interesting to read.
I haven’t said this about a living person in decades, but this is up there with the best of Asimov’s columns.
Thank you! High praise, indeed.
“Even the neutrinos detected from supernova 1987A, 168,000 light years away, arrived so soon after the initial light pulse that we weren’t sure if they were travelling at the speed of light or just very close to it.”
In fact, didn’t the neutrinos arrive well *before* the light pulse? This is because while the core collapse is happening the surrounding star is still opaque to photons. So the neutrinos can escape unimpeded (because they hardly interact with anything) while the photons will take longer to make their way to open space because of the intervening matter.
Ah yes, I should fix that. Thanks.
I like to play a little game with these posts – based on the title alone, can I guess exactly what the proof is?
In this case, I was expecting that you’d explain the need to aim neutrino beams below the horizontal to hit a detector hundreds of kilometres away, but I hadn’t considered the time-of-travel perepective.
And for those curious about neutrino mass, recent experiments (have a link: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-neutrino-experiment-results-give-us-a-better-idea-of-the-ghost-particle-s-mass ) have narrowed down the possible range down to between 0.02eV/c^2 and 1eV/c^2. Which means that at most, a neutrino has 1/500,000th the mass of an electron, which itself has only 1/2,000th the mass of a proton!
That’s a nice little game with the titles. Hopefully there’ll be some real challenges coming up!
“Which means that at most, a neutrino has 1/500,000th the mass of an electron, which itself has only 1/2,000th the mass of a proton!”
Damn!
A devious flat Earther would now remind you of the fiasco where the Opera experiment initially *did* calculate faster than light neutrinos (and then claim the “faulty cable” explanation was a coverup).
A couple typos: “and electron” should be “an electron” and “doman” should be “domain”.
I considered mentioning the faulty flight time measurement, but it was really just an unnecessary complication.
Thanks for the typos… fixed now.
One thing that passed by quickly but I thought warranted more explanation (although possibly it was unrelated to the earth’s shape): if a particle has any mass at all, it MUST be able to instantly and randomly transmute into a different version of particle?
Perhaps you’re thinking of beta decay as an example of a “random transmutation” into multiple particles. In contrast, neutrino oscillation is part of the time evolution of the particle, so it occurs continuously over the neutrino’s lifetime.
From what I can understand of the theory, (relativistic?) neutrinos need to be in a superposition of multiple mass states (not just one mass value) so that those states can have different wavelengths and interfere with each other to cause the oscillation, and the neutrino flavours also need to be superpositions of those mass states (and vice versa) for the oscillation to be detected. Those are features that not every particle has.