Sunday, June 20, 2010

MINOS Neutrinos

As reported by Philip and many others, the MINOS experiment has been releasing results at Neutrino 2010. They claim a $2$ sigma observation of a difference between (electron, muon) $\Delta m^2$ for neutrinos and antineutrinos. That is,
neutrinos have $\Delta m^2 = 2.35 \times 10^{-3} \pm 0.11$ $eV^2$
antineutrinos have $\Delta m^2 = 3.35 \times 10^{-3} \pm 0.45$ $eV^2$
with
neutrino parameter $\textrm{sin}^2 (2 \theta) > 0.91$
antineutrino parameter $\textrm{sin}^2 (\overline{2 \theta}) = 0.86 \pm 0.12$
where $\theta$ is the $2 \times 2$ matrix phase for two neutrino mixing. But the plot shows that one should not be too enthusiastic yet about such a radical result. The data points are for antineutrinos and the dashed line is the neutrino result. Given that such a result could demolish almost everything that has been written about quantum gravity, we live in interesting times.

8 comments:

  1. p-Adic length scale hypothesis and CP breaking provide a simple explanaton once again. There is already old evidence that neutrinos can appear in several p-adic length scales.

    Suppose that the p-adic mass squared scales of neutrinos and and antineutrinos differ by 2 (p =about 2^k by p-adic length scale hypothesis). This means k(nubar)= k(nu)+1.

    This allows same mixing matrices but the scale of delta m^2 is two time larger for neutrinos than for antineutrinos. The experimenteres talk about 40 percent not far from 50 per cent.

    See my blog posting.

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  2. Matti, the team agrees with you that this is a real result ... as you will soon see ...

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  3. I hope you are right Kea, different masses for particles and their anti-particles would upset all conventional theories and bring on a new revolution in particle physics. Even Matti would get a good shout.

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  4. Dammit, where is Carl! This cannot wait ...

    Recall that Carl uses an angle of $2/9 + \pi / 12$ for the neutrino mass matrix. Now Carl has observed (in a private email exchange) that an angle of $\delta =$ $2/9 - \pi / 12$ gives an alternative set of three masses, and these happen to be

    $0.0006$, $0.0582$ and $0.0012$ eV

    using the eigenvalue formula
    $\sqrt{m_i} = 1 + \sqrt{2} \textrm{cos}(\theta)$
    for $\theta = \delta + \omega$, with $\omega$ a cubed root. The first two of these masses give a $\Delta m^2$ of $0.0034$ $eV^2$, in perfect agreement with the MINOS results. (The neutrino masses give the other value, $0.0024$, because this value was originally used to fit the masses).

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  5. I love it when data meets theoretical predictions.

    Khawar Nehal
    http://atrc.net.pk

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  6. Yes, Khawar, this result was essentially predicted in Carl's Koide Hadrons paper. This paper does not mention antineutrinos, but it does make a mention of possible phases equal to $n \pi /12$ for mass triplets, and of course it discusses the neutrinos.

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