Hunting Neutrinos
First of all, I welcome you all to my “going to be interesting” new blog about the most elusive fundamental particles of the universe, neutrinos. This is my first attempt at blogging and I hope you will find my blogs interesting. This blog is simply an introduction to me and the neutrinos, dashing this universe with a speed almost equal to the speed of light, Un-noticed. I am damn sure that you will find the latter introduction more interesting than mine.
About Me
I am a Ph.D. research scholar in the Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Delhi, Delhi, India. I am also a member of the NOvA (NuMI Off-Axis Neutrino Appearance) experiment collaboration. NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment (I will be talking about these things in my upcoming blogs) situated in the US Department of Energy’s Fermilab in Illinois, USA I am working on the extraction of three flavor neutrino oscillation parameters using muon neutrino disappearance and electron neutrino appearance channels. Sounds boring, right? I know. But bear with me on this blog, I won’t be bringing this boring stuff again (about me of course). However, let me remind you that there are still some very interesting things, even in this paragraph, which we will be talking about in the future.
Neutrinos
Neutrinos are the most elusive fundamental particles that we know of. Most elusive because of the fact that neutrinos don’t feel strong (between two nucleons) or electromagnetic force (between two charged particles). Neutrinos feel the “so-called” weak force which is responsible for beta decay of a radioactive nuclei. Neutrinos are the second most abundant particles in this Universe, the first prize goes to the photons, the particles of the light. Neutrinos are produced in the Sun, the Earth, Supernovae explosions. Neutrinos were even produced in the Big Bang. Surprisingly you never encountered one of that. Isn’t is fascinating? The reason being the very weak interactions neutrinos feel. Don’t worry you can feel these tiny particles once in your lifetime. Standard Model (SM), a theory which can explain most of the physical processes around us, predicts that neutrinos are massless. However, this is a well established that neutrinos oscillate from one flavor (we will deal with this concept later, for the time being keep in mind that there are three active neutrino flavor namely, electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino) to other when allowed to propagate in matter or vacuum. These neutrino oscillations can be observed if neutrinos are not massless. I will discuss various aspects Neutrino Oscillations in this blog.
Outline
I am going to follow the following outline in this blog.
- A Brief History of Neutrinos
- Sources of Neutrinos
- Detection of Neutrinos
- Neutrino Mixing
- Neutrino Oscillations
- Ongoing Neutrino Oscillations Experiments
I am going to cover all these topics in this series of blogs. Please let me know If you have any suggestions or comments. Stay tuned for my upcoming blogs.