Forget the Higgs, neutrinos may be the key to breaking the Standard Model
Ethereal as they are, neutrinos could make hefty changes to our understanding of the universe if physicists could answer four main questions: How does regular matter affect neutrinos? What causes neutrinos to have mass? Do antineutrinos live different lives from normal neutrinos? And even odder, are these ghostly particles their own antiparticles?
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The Standard Model, which physicists have populated since the 1950s with quarks, leptons, and force-carrying particles, does not hold the answers.
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Neutrinos are the second most abundant particles in the Universe (after photons), but they carry no charge and are puny. Neutrinos are at least a million times lighter than an electron, though no experiment has been able to definitively measure their mass. They also barely interact with any matter. They are generated in distant supernovae and travel unhindered through the debris. Neutrinos zip through planets in a single bound without leaving a trace. Billions and billions of them are streaming from the Sun as you read this, blowing through your screen—and through you—without a care
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Even if this experiment succeeds in generating new mass data, physicists won’t be able to say exactly how that mass arises. Because neutrinos are so much lighter than any other particle, the Higgs mechanism is unlikely to endow them with mass the way it does other particles, Messier says
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Breaking the paradigm could point to something very strange: the idea that neutrinos are their own anti-neutrinos (which would put them in a group called “Majorana particles”). Such Jekyll-and-Hyde particles are capable of vibrating in two different forms: rather than two distinct entities, one normal and one antimatter, there’s just one individual particle that can be either, depending on how you look at it. The only particles known to live this way are bosons, such as the photon.
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Ethereal as they are, neutrinos could make hefty changes to our understanding of the universe if physicists could answer four main questions: How does regular matter affect neutrinos? What causes neutrinos to have mass? Do antineutrinos live different lives from normal neutrinos? And even odder, are these ghostly particles their own antiparticles?
...
The Standard Model, which physicists have populated since the 1950s with quarks, leptons, and force-carrying particles, does not hold the answers.
...
Neutrinos are the second most abundant particles in the Universe (after photons), but they carry no charge and are puny. Neutrinos are at least a million times lighter than an electron, though no experiment has been able to definitively measure their mass. They also barely interact with any matter. They are generated in distant supernovae and travel unhindered through the debris. Neutrinos zip through planets in a single bound without leaving a trace. Billions and billions of them are streaming from the Sun as you read this, blowing through your screen—and through you—without a care
...
Even if this experiment succeeds in generating new mass data, physicists won’t be able to say exactly how that mass arises. Because neutrinos are so much lighter than any other particle, the Higgs mechanism is unlikely to endow them with mass the way it does other particles, Messier says
...
Breaking the paradigm could point to something very strange: the idea that neutrinos are their own anti-neutrinos (which would put them in a group called “Majorana particles”). Such Jekyll-and-Hyde particles are capable of vibrating in two different forms: rather than two distinct entities, one normal and one antimatter, there’s just one individual particle that can be either, depending on how you look at it. The only particles known to live this way are bosons, such as the photon.
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