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) Δm2 for neutrinos and antineutrinos. That is,
neutrinos have Δm2=2.35×10-3±0.11 eV2
antineutrinos have Δm2=3.35×10-3±0.45 eV2
with
neutrino parameter sin2(2θ)>0.91
antineutrino parameter sin2(2θ¯)=0.86±0.12
where θ is the 2×2 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+π/12 for the neutrino mass matrix. Now Carl has observed (in a private email exchange) that an angle of δ= 2/9-π/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
    mi=1+2cos(θ)
    for θ=δ+ω, with ω a cubed root. The first two of these masses give a Δm2 of 0.0034 eV2, 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 nπ/12 for mass triplets, and of course it discusses the neutrinos.

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