Email us. Toggle navigation. Mysteries How much does a neutrino weigh? Which neutrino is the lightest? How many flavors of neutrinos are there? Are neutrinos their own antiparticles? Are all neutrinos left-handed? Do neutrinos violate the symmetries of physics? Where do the most energetic neutrinos come from? Other neutrinos are continuously being produced from nuclear power stations, particle accelerators, nuclear bombs, and general atmospheric phenomena as well as from the births, collisions, and deaths of stars, particularly the explosions of supernovas.
A collision involving a high-energy proton will also produce neutrinos, so cosmic ray sources also produce neutrinos. IceCube is designed to identify the byproducts of neutrino interactions. Most neutrinos zoom right through matter, leaving no detectable presence. A neutrino that does interact produces electrically charged particles that can produce a readily measurable signal in a transparent medium.
IceCube measures the light generated by secondary particles produced when neutrinos, with energies of thousands to billions of times greater than the fusion reactions that power the sun, interact in the South Pole ice. The first and most important question to answer is: Are neutrinos Majorana fermions? In this process, a neutron inside an isotope, in this case a germanium isotope, decays and spits out an electron and neutrino.
Scientists are looking for neutrinoless double beta decay, in which the nucleus seems to emit only two electrons and no neutrinos because the neutrinos have paired Majorana-style and been annihilated. Observing double beta decay is extremely rare.
Neutrinoless double beta decay—if it occurs—would be even rarer. Questions like: Why is there more matter in the universe than antimatter? Why is the expansion of the universe accelerating?
Where does dark matter come from? Scientists on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider see massive W particles emerging from collisions with electromagnetic fields.
How can this happen? Nearly 75 years after the puzzling first detection of the kaon, scientists are still looking to the particle for hints of physics beyond their current understanding. Scientists know the Higgs boson interacts with extremely massive particles. Extremely massive fundamental particles could exist, but they would seriously mess with our understanding of quantum mechanics.
Just over 40 years ago, a new theory about the early universe provided a way to tackle multiple cosmological conundrums at once. But where does that mass come from? The neutrino as its own opposite Although scientists have yet to detect right-handed neutrinos, they already know of a different group of right-handed particles in the neutrino ecosystem: antineutrinos.
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