Back in 4th grade science class … Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. In March 2012, the ICARUS team published results directly contradicting the results of OPERA. But there would always be the same probability of tasting a certain flavor given a type of coin. [5], From Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core, CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (, "Observation of high-energy neutrino reactions and the existence of two kinds of neutrinos", "OPERA experiment reports anomaly in flight time of neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso (UPDATE 8 June 2012)", "Observations in Particle Physics from Two Neutrinos to the Standard Model", "The First High Energy Neutrino Experiment", "Experiments with High-Energy Neutrino Beams", https://infogalactic.com/w/index.php?title=Muon_neutrino&oldid=165088, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, About Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core, left-handed (for right-handed neutrinos, see. Electron neutrinos interact to make electrons, muon neutrinos make muons, and tau neutrinos make taus. The muon neutrino is a lepton, an elementary subatomic particle which has the symbol ν μ and no net electric charge. The basic properties of the electron-neutrino—no electric charge and little mass—were predicted in 1930 by the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli to explain the apparent loss of energy in the process of radioactive beta decay. Some of the gold coins start to fall behind a little bit, while the lighter copper ones fly a little further. This article was most recently revised and updated by, The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory - Neutrino. This makes good sense—when neutrinos interact in detectors, they typically produce their signature charged particle, making the neutrino flavor immediately obvious. These results have been viewed skeptically by the scientific community at large, and more experiments have/are investigating the phenomenon. They know that the masses of the three neutrinos are small. Antimuons, in mirror fashion, most often decay to the corresponding antiparticles: a positron , an electron neutrino, and a muon antineutrino. A flavor of a neutrino (such as the electron neutrino) is made of a combination of masses (1, 2, and 3), and a neutrino of a certain mass (such as the lightest neutrino) has a certain probability of interacting in a detector to make a certain flavored charged particle (electron, muon, or tau). …electrically neutral particle called the neutrino.…, Massive neutrinos and supersymmetric particles both provide possible explanations for the nonluminous, or “dark,” matter that is believed to constitute 26.5 percent of the mass of the universe. Neutrino, elementary subatomic particle with no electric charge, very little mass, and 1/2 unit of spin. Because of the way things get really weird at small scales, these pure mass states would still have a probability of interacting as a certain flavor. When the neutrino interacts again after a certain distance, it will have some probability of interacting as an electron neutrino, but it will also have a probability of interacting as either a muon or tau neutrino. Chasing Neutrinos - YouTube. When a third type of lepton, the tau, was discovered in 1975 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, it too … There are three types of neutrino, each associated with a charged lepton—i.e., the electron, the muon, and the tau—and therefore given the corresponding names electron-neutrino, muon-neutrino, and tau-neutrino. You can easily identify the flavor as chocolate (and not vanilla or strawberry) the same way a detector can taste the incoming neutrino flavor (as an electron and not muon or tau neutrino). Rather, neutrinos are subject to the weak force that underlies certain processes of radioactive decay. The dominant muon decay mode (sometimes called the Michel decay after Louis Michel) is the simplest possible: the muon decays to an electron, an electron antineutrino, and a muon neutrino.