3.5 Neutrinos Mx

news feature On the trail of the neutrino Huge arrays of detectors now have these ghostly particles CHAMBERS NEUTRINO OBSERVATORY/R. SUDBURY in their sights — but will what they see lead physicists to rethink the standard model? Dan Falk investigates. n the subatomic zoo, few particles are as elusive as the neutrino. The Universe is Iawash with them, but they slide through most forms of matter with ease. Billions have passed through your body since you started reading this article. By one estimate, the average neutrino could travel for 1,000 light-years through solid matter before being stopped. This reluctance to interact with matter makes neutrinos difficult to detect. But, almost half a century after they were first spotted, neutrinos have become the focus of intense study. Exciting results from existing detectors, together with plans for new detector projects, promise to make this a busy decade for neutrino hunters. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Ontario is poised to illuminate the physics of neutrinos produced by the Sun, and a new detector in Antarctica is making Full house: the detector at Sudbury Neutrino Observatory can detect all three flavours of neutrino. progress towards studying neutrinos from deep space — a first step towards building a particles. The last of the three flavours to be neutrons or electrons it governs. Physicists larger astrophysical neutrino observatory. detected was the tau neutrino, finally snared maximize their chances of observing these Other detectors in North America, Europe last year in an experiment at the Tevatron rare interactions by monitoring huge num- and Japan are catching neutrinos produced accelerator in Fermilab, near Chicago1. bers of potential neutrino targets. Large when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere or by The problem faced by neutrino hunters is tanks of water are a common choice — water particle accelerators here on Earth. “I think that all three flavours of neutrinos are is cheap, plentiful and, being transparent, it it’s fair to say that this is the era of the neutri- extremely unwilling to interact with other allows physicists to spot any interactions that no,” says John Bahcall of the Institute for subatomic particles. Of the four types of fun- occur deep inside the tank. The tanks are Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a damental interaction between particles, held deep below ground, so that other parti- pioneer of neutrino physics. neutrinos interact almost exclusively cles are screened out by the overlying rock. through the weak nuclear force, the puny There are several types of interaction to Three of a kind force responsible for some radioactive look for. The simplest is ‘elastic scattering’ — According to the standard model, the suc- decays. As they do not carry charge, neutri- high-speed collisions between electrons in cessful but incomplete theory that describes nos avoid electromagnetic interactions. Nor water molecules and incoming neutrinos. fundamental particles and their interac- do they interact through the strong nuclear The collision leaves the electrons travelling tions, neutrinos come in three types or force that binds nuclei together. The jury is faster than the speed of light through water. ‘flavours’: electron, muon and tau neutri- still out on whether neutrinos feel gravity, As a result, the electrons emit dim, blue flash- nos. The names derive from links within the but if they do, the forces involved will be tiny. es of light known as Cerenkov radiation — model between the neutrinos and other So the only practical way to snag a neutri- the optical equivalent of the ‘sonic boom’ particles — the familiar electron and its no hinges on the weak nuclear force and the created by supersonic aircraft. Neutrinos can rarer, heavier cousins the muon and tau interactions between neutrinos and protons, also collide with neutrons or protons in 10 © 2001 Macmillan Magazines Ltd NATURE | VOL 411 | 3 MAY 2001 | www.nature.com news feature atomic nuclei, and some of the particles pro- Super-K, have studied the problem, but duced in these reactions also travel fast irm data on because they are not equipped to distinguish enough to produce Cerenkov radiation. In between the various solar-generated neutri- each case, the flashes of light can be captured Fneutrino mass nos, the results have been inconclusive. by photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) on the The SNO, a joint project between Cana- sides of the detector tanks. could point the way to da, the United States and Britain, has per- Detectors such as these could help to settle haps the greatest chance of resolving the the most pressing issue in neutrino physics a more elegant theory. issue. Located at the bottom of one of North — that of the neutrino mass. The standard America’s deepest mines, 300 kilometres model says that neutrinos should have zero But the experiment is not foolproof. The north of Toronto, the SNO’s detector is a mass, but evidence from solar physics and calculation depends on the rate at which spherical vat 12 metres across, filled with some proposed Grand Unified Theories — atmospheric neutrinos are produced, and 1,000 tonnes of heavy water and lined with efforts to unify electromagnetism and the this is not known precisely. Those involved 10,000 PMTs. Heavy water contains deuteri- strong and weak nuclear forces as different with the project are confident that Super-K um — an isotope of hydrogen that has a neu- aspects of a single interaction — points has indeed seen neutrino flavour-switching. tron as well as a proton in its nucleus. instead to the particles having a small mass. “The oscillation theory quite nicely explains Most Cerenkov radiation observed at For physicists, the tell-tale sign that neutrinos our data,” says Yoji Totsuka, the observatory’s other detectors comes from interactions have mass would be ‘flavour-switching’, or director and head of the Institute for Cosmic between electron neutrinos and either neu- oscillation. Neutrinos oscillate if they switch Ray Research at the University of Tokyo. trons or electrons. But the SNO’s deuterium from one flavour to another as they travel. The atoms allow it to detect another type of colli- way in which such switching would occur is Solar flaws sion which is more sensitive to the other neu- not fully understood, but physicists know that Conclusive evidence for neutrino oscilla- trino flavours. Incoming neutrinos — elec- to oscillate neutrinos need to have mass2. tion would also solve one of the longest- tron, muon or tau — can, very occasionally, In 1998, a team of US and Japanese standing questions in solar physics. From split the proton and neutron in deuterium researchers using the Super-Kamiokande, or what we understand about how the Sun apart. Gamma rays are generated if the neu- Super-K, detector in Japan found evidence produces neutrinos, 60 billion solar neutri- tron released by this fission is subsequently that appeared to support the idea of neutrinos should pass through every square centi- captured by another deuterium nucleus, and nos with mass3. The story landed on the front metre of the Earth’s surface every second. the SNO’s PMTs can detect this radiation. page of The New York Times under a headline But measurements from neutrino detectors This ability to catch all three types of neu- declaring that the “Universe May Never Be suggest that only between a half and a third trinos is the SNO’s big advantage. By compar- the Same”. of this figure are reaching the Earth2,4 . ing the numbers of each type of solar neutrino Either the models that describe the Sun’s arriving at Earth with the number expected Something in the air interior are flawed — and most scientists from theories of solar physics, the SNO Buried deep under Mount Ikena near the doubt this to be the case — or something is should be able to settle the neutrino flavour- town of Kamioka, 200 kilometres northwest happening to the neutrinos between their switching issue. The SNO team should have a of Tokyo, the Super-K detector uses 13,000 emission from the Sun’s core and their major announcement within months, says PMTs to monitor a 50-million-litre tank of arrival on Earth. In the main, the Sun gener- Art McDonald, the observatory’s director. water. It searches for signatures of ‘atmos- ates electron neutrinos, but most physicists Other physicists are studying neutrinos pheric neutrinos’ — electron or muon neu- think that many of these switch flavours en produced by artificial sources such as trinos produced when high-speed atomic route, turning into muon neutrinos or tau nuclear reactors and particle accelerators. nuclei and electrons from deep space collide neutrinos. Neutrino detectors, including Researchers using these sources have more ▲ with oxygen or nitrogen atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere. These neutrinos can be singled out because they come from a different direction and have a different energy compared with other neutrinos. MORSE ROBERT The present theory of how atmospheric neutrinos are generated suggests that Super- K should detect twice as many muon neutrinos as electron neutrinos. Instead, it is recording roughly equal numbers of each3. This, argues the Super-K team, shows that some of the muon neutrinos are turning into something else — tau neutrinos — as they travel through the atmosphere and the Earth’s crust. Super-K cannot detect tau neutrinos because the particles produced when they collide with atomic nuclei are usually too short-lived to generate Cerenkov radiation. Although the Super-K results cannot give a specific value for the mass of any neutrino flavour, they can be used to calculate a mass difference — in this case, a fraction of a mil- lionth of the mass of an electron — between Eyes down: One of AMANDA’s photomultipliers the muon and tau types.

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