All articles tagged with #sterile neutrinos
Scientists are exploring the nature of dark matter, which makes up about 85% of the universe's matter, by studying galaxy clusters with NASA's XRISM telescope. They are particularly interested in detecting signals from hypothetical particles called sterile neutrinos, which could decay and produce observable X-ray emissions, potentially revealing the particles that constitute dark matter.
Physicists are advancing research into neutrinos, the universe's most abundant particles with mass, to answer fundamental questions about the universe's origins. A new paper outlines the next decade of global neutrino research, including the search for a potential fourth 'sterile' neutrino. Major projects like the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) in the U.S. and Hyper-Kamiokande in Japan aim to explore neutrino behavior and anomalies, potentially explaining why matter dominates over antimatter. These efforts involve extensive international collaboration and significant investment.
The IceCube Collaboration has conducted a comprehensive search for sterile neutrinos using 10.7 years of data from their detector at the South Pole, but found no evidence of their existence. This result, published in Physical Review Letters, further lowers the probability of sterile neutrinos existing, consistent with the standard three-neutrino model. The study involved improved data modeling and analysis, contributing to the ongoing investigation into neutrino physics.
A study by scientists from Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories has confirmed that the germanium-71 isotope has an 11-day half-life, ruling out mismeasurement as the cause of the "gallium anomaly." This anomaly, where the production rate of germanium-71 from neutrino interactions is lower than expected, remains unexplained and may point to the existence of a fourth type of neutrino, known as a sterile neutrino.
Collider experiments at CERN have placed new constraints on the seesaw mechanism, a popular model for the origin of neutrino mass. The CMS Collaboration searched for a hypothetical heavy neutrino that could be tied to neutrino mass generation but found no evidence of its existence. These results provide important constraints on variants of the seesaw mechanism and pave the way for future studies combining searches for lepton number violation and sterile neutrinos. While neutrino oscillation experiments have made progress in determining oscillation parameters, the underlying mechanism of neutrino mass generation remains elusive.