Science Current Events | Science News | Brightsurf.com
 
Email a Friend Send to a friend
Printer Friendly Print Einstein's relativity survives neutrino test

Einstein's relativity survives neutrino test

October 16, 2008

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Physicists working to disprove "Lorentz invariance" -- Einstein's prediction that matter and massless particles will behave the same no matter how they're turned or how fast they go -- won't get that satisfaction from muon neutrinos, at least for the time being, says a consortium of scientists.

The test of Lorentz invariance, conducted by MINOS Experiment scientists and reported in the Oct. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters, started with a stream of muon neutrinos produced at Fermilab particle accelerator, near Chicago, and ended with a neutrino detector 750 meters away and 103 meters below ground. As the Earth does its daily rotation, the neutrino beam rotates too.




"If there's a field out there that can cause violations of Lorentz invariance, we should be able to see its effects as the beam rotates in space," said Indiana University Bloomington astrophysicist Stuart Mufson, a project leader. "But we did not. Einsteinian relativity lives to see another day."

Mufson is quick to point out that the Physical Review Letters report does not disprove the existence of a Lorentz-violating field. Despite the sophistication and power of MINOS's detector, "It may be that the field's effects are so exceedingly small that you'd need extraordinary tools to detect it," Mufson said.

Mufson is a member of the MINOS Experiment, an international consortium of physicists dedicated to studying the mysterious properties of neutrinos, particularly their wave-like oscillations. MINOS stands for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search. MINOS scientists utilize the facilities at Fermilab to create a neutrino beam. The neutrinos are aimed at two detectors: one at Fermilab (the near detector) and another in the Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota (the far detector).

To produce the neutrinos, the MINOS scientists point a proton beam at a carbon target. The interaction causes a spray of pions (or pi mesons, a type of subatomic particle), some of which decay into muon neutrinos in the direction of the detector. Neutrinos travel at close to the speed of light, are unaffected by gravitational and magnetic fields, and because of their peculiar properties, can travel right through the crust of the Earth unaffected.

The notion of a Lorentz-violating field has become popular among theoretical physicists. Known physical rules do not do a very good job of explaining the cataclysmically chaotic moments immediately following the Big Bang, so some physicists are developing new theories to sort out the mess. The possibility that some of these new theories violate relativity was proposed by Mufson colleague Alan Kostelecky, distinguished professor of physics at IU Bloomington. Kostelecky provided some advice to MINOS scientists for the present report.

Kostelecky's "Standard-Model Extension" describes the most general possible Lorentz-violating fields that could arise in the universe's beginnings and also ties together Einstein's relativity rules and post-Einsteinian quantum mechanics.

One of the implications of Kostelecky's ideas is that the Lorentz-violating field could have been very strong during the mind-numbingly brief first moments of our universe. Now that the universe has expanded to considerable size, however, the strength of the Lorentz violating field may be severely reduced, making its existence hard to detect, if it is, indeed, actually there.

"Every experiment so far has not found violations of Lorentz invariance," Mufson said. "That doesn't mean we'll stop looking. We knew the MINOS Experiment presented a new way of seeking out violations, and in a difference place. We do things that are simple and look for something profound."

Indiana University



Related Neutrinos Current Events and Neutrinos News Articles Neutrinos Current Events and Neutrinos News RSS Neutrinos Current Events and Neutrinos News RSS
UD researchers focus on building telescope at South Pole
It's 40 degrees F below zero (with the wind chill) at the South Pole today. Yet a research team from the University of Delaware is taking it all in stride.

Crystal bells stay silent as physicists look for dark matter
Scientists of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment today announced that they have regained the lead in the worldwide race to find the particles that make up dark matter. The CDMS experiment, conducted a half-mile underground in a mine in Soudan, Minn., again sets the world's best constraints on the properties of dark matter candidates.

Were the first stars dark?
Perhaps the first stars in the newborn universe did not shine, but instead were invisible "dark stars" 400 to 200,000 times wider than the sun and powered by the annihilation of mysterious dark matter, a University of Utah study concludes

Scientists discover possible cosmic defect, remnant from Big Bang
Scientists from the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (IFCA) and the University of Cambridge may have discovered an example of a cosmic defect, a remnant from the Big Bang called a texture.

Dwarf galaxies need dark matter too, U-M astronomers say
Stars in dwarf spheroidal galaxies behave in a way that suggests the galaxies are utterly dominated by dark matter, University of Michigan astronomers have found.

Researchers detect low-energy neutrinos, probe energy production in sun's center
In collaboration with scientists from institutions in the United States and Europe, researchers from Virginia Tech have observed tell-tale signals of neutrinos emitted by thermonuclear fusion reactions that power the sun deep in its interior.

Catching Some Rays
An international team of researchers has detected low-energy solar neutrinos--subatomic particles produced in the core of the sun--and measured in real-time the rate the particles hit our planet.

Princeton scientists confirm long-held theory about source of sunshine
Scientists are a step closer to understanding sunshine. A monumental experiment buried deep beneath the mountains of Italy has provided Princeton physicists with a clearer understanding of the sun's heart -- and of a mysterious class of subatomic particles born there.

MiniBooNE findings clarify the behavior of neutrinos
The initial data from the 10-year long "MiniBooNE" experiment at the Department of Energy's Fermilab significantly clarifies the overall picture of how the neutrino fundamental particles behave.

Long-standing neutrino question resolved
An announcement by scientists at the Department of Energy's Fermilab today significantly clarifies the overall picture of how neutrinos behave.
More Neutrinos Current Events and Neutrinos News Articles
The Neutrino: Ghost Particle of the Atom
by Isaac Asimov



Fundamentals of Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics
by Carlo Giunti, Chung W. Kim

This book deals with neutrino physics and astrophysics- a field in which some of the most exciting recent developments in particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology took place. The book is the most up-to-date, comprehensive and self-contained treatment of key issues in neutrino physics. It discusses all the topics vital to the understanding of the nature of neutrinos such as what they are, how...



The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino
by Alec Wilkinson

The Happiest Man in the World buoyantly describes seventy-four-year-old David Pearlman, a restless and migratory soul, a mariner, a musician, a member of the Explorers Club and a friend of the San Francisco Beats, a former preacher and sign painter, a polymath, a pauper, and a football strategist for the Red Mesa Redskins of the Navajo Nation. When Pearlman was fifty, he was bitten on the hand by...



Physics of Neutrinos
by Masataka Fukugita, Tsutomu Yanagida

This book provides a survey of the current state of research into the physics of neutrinos. It is presented in a pedagogical form accessible to non-specialists and graduate students, but will also be useful as a handbook for researchers in this field. The reader finds here a global view of the areas of physics in which neutrinos play important roles, including astrophysics and cosmology. The book...



Massive Neutrinos in Physics and Astrophysics, Third Edition (World Scientific Lecture Notes in Physics, Vol. 72)
by R. N. Mohapatra, Palash B. Pal

The recent groundbreaking discovery of nonzero neutrino masses and oscillations has put the spotlight on massive neutrinos as one of the key windows on physics beyond the standard model as well as into the early universe. This third edition of the invaluable book Massive Neutrinos in Physics and Astrophysics is an introduction to the various issues related to the theory and phenomenology of...

Physics of Massive Neutrinos (World Scientific Lecture Notes in Physics)
by Boris Kayser, Francoise Gibrat-Debu, Frederic Perrier



Neutrino Drag
by Paul Di Filippo

What do Jayne Mansfield, Pythagoras, Disney "imagineers," and the Virgin Mary have in common? They are all privileged to be protagonists in the stories in Paul Di Filippo's newest collection. Twenty tales to rock the mind, of mental pygmies and product placement, gentle giants and teen witches. The title story is a Robert Williams cartoon come to life, in which the narrator races roadsters in "a...



Physics of Massive Neutrinos
by Felix Boehm, Petr Vogel

Neutrinos play a decisive part in nuclear and elementary particle physics, as well as in astrophysics and cosmology. Because they interact so weakly with matter, some of their basic properties, such as mass charge conjugation symmetry, are largely unknown. These subjects are considered in detail by authors, who also discuss such topics as neutrino mixing, neutrino decay, neutrino oscillations,...



Spaceship Neutrino
by Christine Sutton

Spaceship Neutrino charts the history of the neutrino, from its beginnings in the 1930s, when it was postulated as a way of explaining an otherwise intractable problem in physics, to its crucial role in modern theories of the Universe. Christine Sutton is well known for her popular science writing. In this book she describes how the detection and measurement of neutrino properties have tested...



Confluence of Cosmology, Massive Neutrinos, Elementary Particles, and Gravitation

This conference was based on the discovery that neutrinos are massive objects, which gives elementary particle physics a new direction. This is the first in a series of conferences that will discuss the implications of this discovery and related issues, such as the impact on cosmology, proton spin content, strings, fractional spin and statistics, gravitation, and accelerated expansion of the...

© 2009 BrightSurf.com