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Chapter 10: Neutrinos

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Chapter 10: Neutrinos

pp. 435-480

Authors

, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
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Extract

Neutrinos are the most difficult particle to study, because they interact only via weak interactions. However, they have given revolutionary surprises, and it is with neutrinos that physics beyond the SM has been discovered. In the SM, neutrino masses are rigorously zero, but experiments show that they do have a mass. In the SM, neutrino flavour eigenstates are mass eigenstates; experiments show that they are mixtures of them. Two discoveries proved this. One is neutrino oscillations, discovered in atmospheric neutrinos, the other is the adiabatic flavour conversion in matter, discovered in solar neutrinos.

These were with natural neutrinos. Several experiments have been, and are being, performed with artificial neutrinos from reactors or accelerators to measure with increasing accuracy the neutrino mixing matrix and the mass spectrum. We found that the neutrino mixing is much larger than that of the quarks. Nobody knows why.

The SM assumes neutrinos to be different from antineutrinos, but no experimental proof of it exists. Neutrinos and antineutrinos may well be the same particle, a Majorana spinor. We see how this is searched for by looking for the extremely rare double beta decay.

Keywords

  • neutrino mixing matrix
  • neutrino mass
  • neutrino oscillations
  • flavour conversion in matter
  • coupled pendulums
  • CP violation
  • solar neutrinos
  • atmospheric neutrinos
  • cosmology
  • beta decay
  • double beta decay
  • Majorana neutrinos

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