neutrinos – Quanta Magazine

What Could Explain the Gallium Anomaly?

Jonathan O'Callaghan — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 13:30:54 +0000

Deep in the Caucasus Mountains, on the border between Russia and Georgia, an unusual experiment is taking place. In an underground lab shielded by a mountain of rock, highly radioactive material sits inside a vat of liquid gallium, blasting out particles called neutrinos that break the gallium down into atoms of germanium. The goal is to resolve a little-known mystery of physics: the gallium...

Source

A New Map of the Universe, Painted With Cosmic Neutrinos

Thomas Lewton — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 18:00:20 +0000

Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, most come from the sun or Earth’s atmosphere. But a smattering of the particles — those moving much faster than the rest — traveled here from powerful sources farther away. For decades, astrophysicists have sought the origin of these “cosmic” neutrinos. Now, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has finally collected enough of them to...

Source

Sparse Networks Come to the Aid of Big Physics

Steve Nadis — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 14:33:06 +0000

Suppose you have a thousand-page book, but each page has only a single line of text. You’re supposed to extract the information contained in the book using a scanner, only this particular scanner systematically goes through each and every page, scanning one square inch at a time. It would take you a long time to get through the whole book with that scanner, and most of that time would be wasted...

Source

What Is Quantum Field Theory and Why Is It Incomplete?

Steven Strogatz — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 20:35:53 +0000

Quantum field theory may be the most successful scientific theory of all time, predicting experimental results with stunning accuracy and advancing the study of higher dimensional mathematics. Yet, there’s also reason to believe that it is missing something. Steven Strogatz speaks with David Tong, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, to explore the open questions of this...

Source

Is the Great Neutrino Puzzle Pointing to Multiple Missing Particles?

Thomas Lewton — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 14:39:10 +0000

Years of conflicting neutrino measurements have led physicists to propose a “dark sector” of invisible particles — one that could simultaneously explain dark matter, the puzzling expansion of the universe, and other mysteries.

The post Is the Great Neutrino Puzzle Pointing to Multiple Missing Particles? first appeared on Quanta Magazine