Neutrino Experiment Restores Standard Model Symmetry

perturbed1 writes "A Fermilab press release announced that MiniBooNE's latest results have salvaged the Standard Model of particle physics. The experiment ruled out the simple neutrino oscillation interpretation of the 1990s LSND experiment. Neutrinos have a tiny amount of mass, required by their oscillations, as observed in solar, atmospheric, and reactor neutrino experiments. Combining this mass with the LSND experiment's results required the presence of a fourth but 'sterile' neutrino, breaking the 3-fold symmetry of particle families in the standard model." Nice to see some good news out of Fermilab after the CERN debacle.

Good news

Can Fermilab next restore Newton's model? That speed of light thing is hampering processor speed and space travel.

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What is inertia, where does it come from? How do you explain it with particle physics? Start answering those questions and the speed of light stops being a barrier.

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What is inertia, where does it come from?

Mine comes from nearly a decade in a sedentary job, and way too much cola over same time period. What does that have to do with the speed of light, though?

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Mine comes from nearly a decade in a sedentary job, and way too much cola over same time period. What does that have to do with the speed of light, though?

It's all that mass that you've gained over the years that's slowing light down. ;-)

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Actually, things without inertia (photons, for example) automatically go the speed of light. As a particle's energy increases (beyond rest mass energy), it becomes more "photon like" in that it asymptotically approaches the speed of light. So removing ine

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The question is: why? How do you explain this observed phenomona that things without inertia go the speed of light? Where does inertia come from? Einstein proposed a possible explaination [wikipedia.org] which he attributed to Mach (and Mach refused) but other than tha

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causality and locality are already dead aint they?

anyway.. I'm quite happy to say we don't know enough to say one way or another whether or not the speed of light is a real barrier to an advanced civilization.

Exotic matter is believed to exist. Techniques

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Inertia is a fashion garment worn by ladies in the 1920s, but mostly forgotten today. Originally, it was spelled inner-tiara, but with time the word contracted into its present form: inertia. It originated in Paris, as every fashion-garment from the 1920s

Processor speed?

Space travel I can understand, but don't you dare try to pin processor speed limits on the speed of light. If you want a fast computer, you can do it just fine under the present model. Simply compress 1 kg of matter into a black hole of radius 1.485e-27 m

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Not enough if you are running Vista!!!!!

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Sounds pretty much like the last Intel P4 I had. Let me put it this way, in that context "smokin'" is not a compliment.

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Basic Algebra:

x = 100x
x/x = 100

as 0/0 = [-infinity,infinity]
and [-infinity,infinity] contains 100
x can = 0

So, it's doable! Just make sure you get the speed of light to be perfectly 0 and I'll up that speed limit for you in a snap.

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We need a mod category +/-0, Nice Try.

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Back to Jr. High School for doing it the hard way!

x = 100x
0 = 100x - x --- Subtract x from both sides
0 = (100 - 1)x -- Factor a little
0 = 99x ------- Oooh! Arithmetic!
0 = x --------- Divide through by 99...

NOT good news!

This isn't exactly what most scientist would consider "good news". We already know that both the standard model and the general relativity are wrong or at least incomplete, but they continue to pass every experiment, including this one...

The reason they keep trying is because they hope to finally find something different from what those theories predict: this will probably open a very exciting period of progress for our understanding of the universe.

More infos: start from unsolved problems in physics [wikipedia.org] and click links.

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We already know that both the standard model and the general relativity are wrong or at least incomplete.

Not trolling, but the above statement reminds me of the following quotation:
All models are wrong, some are useful.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki [wikiquote.org]

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Not trolling, but the above statement reminds me of the following quotation:
All models are wrong, some are useful.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_E._P._Box/ [wikiquote.org]

Indeed, that's exactly the point. The Standard Model is quite useful, but also "wrong" and (even worse) wrong in a rather boring sort of way. The problem is that to find a new model that's slightly less wrong, or at least a more interesting kind of wrong,

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I consider it bad news from the viewpoint that unexpected results are much more exciting to everyone involved. If you have dedicated your life to the standard model then you might not be happy about it but it would certainly wake you up.

Re:NOT good news!

We already know that both the standard model and the general relativity are wrong or at least incomplete, but they continue to pass every experiment

(Emphasis mine). If that's true, then how do we "already know" that the standard model and GR are broken? The way that we tell if a theory is broken is by experimentation.

I know you're probably talking about the whole dark matter/energy debate, but neither of those means general relativity is broken, necessarily. They could be indications that general relativity needs some elaboration or, most likely, there exists circumstances where we can experimentally show it to be broken (i.e., not just by observing cosmology from afar but actually in a lab). If we haven't found those circumstances yet, experimentation is how we keep looking. The good news of this article is that one experiment's results, which if accepted would have required major rewriting of theories, were not reproducible. We're one step closer to explaining them.

Because they disagree

If theory A predicts one thing and theory B predicts another then they can't both be right. You don't need an experiment to tell you that, logic is sufficient. Unfortunately, the situations in which they disagree are ones that we cannot easily reproduce or observe in nature. Until we do find such evidence we won't know exactly how they are wrong, or the correct way the reconcile them, but it doesn't preclude us from knowing that they are incomplete.

but neither of those means general relativity is broken, necessarily. They could be indications that general relativity needs some elaboration

Now you're just playing semantic games. Yeah, few established theories are ever shown to be completely wrong, just simplifications that only work in certain circumstances. As far as science is concerned "broken" and incomplete mean the same thing.

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If theory A predicts one thing and theory B predicts another then they can't both be right. You don't need an experiment to tell you that, logic is sufficient.

Are you sure? [wikipedia.org]

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By "logic", one usually means just that. That "logic" can also mean "a family of mathematical formalisms for describing systems involving truth-values or at least stuff that has some resemblance to truth-values" does not mean that quantum logic should be y

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As far as science is concerned "broken" and incomplete mean the same thing.

Then all science is "broken," since it will always be incomplete.
As an engineer something isn't "broken" until it stops working. That's why we still use Newtonian physics for solvi

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The problem is that as stated, the Standard Model and General Relativity are mutually exclusive. As they stand, both imply the invalidity of the other. But General Relativity is great for analyzing big things, and the standard model for extremely tiny thin

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The way that we tell if a theory is broken is by experimentation.

That is not entirely true. A theory which also gives infinite answers to certain questions, or answers which contract results from other (accepted) theories must be broken as well. For the

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As G.R. and Q.M. are contradictory, there must be a more complete theory (the "Grand Unified Theory") which simplifies to G.R. in the limit of large sizes and to Q.M. in the limit of small gravitational potentials.

We already see many other such simplificat

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But do they continue to pass every experiment at the same time?

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GP is right, it's NOT good news, it just breathes new life into something that is more description than theory. The Standard Model is just a "good story" of how the universe works, akin to the "earth, air, fire, water" model of elements (albeit with more

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So what more do you want out of science? Science is empirical and descriptive; if you start introducing theoretical components that are non-empirical, you move out of science and beyond the realm of empirical verifiability. There be monsters.

Congratulations

if you start introducing theoretical components that are non-empirical, you move out of science and beyond the realm of empirical verifiability. There be monsters.

You've just given a meta description of string theory.

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You've just written a sentence.

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Good luck in that. I try to have less loftier goals, such as saving humanity from war or famine, or something like that.

This was pretty much expected

The Los Alamos results seemed fishy, so I think most particle physicists expected the sterile neutrino interpretation to be disconfirmed.

Science and non-science

"Nice to see some good news out of Fermilab after the CERN debacle"
So it would be bad news if an experiment showed something you were hoping you wouldn't get? That isn't science. Science is being happy when your experiment successfully tests the hypothesis, regardless of whether it confirmed it or not. A success is in gathering more data, a failure having the experiment give no useful information.

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Maybe he meant it's good news because the experiment yielded a useful result, and nothing blew up?

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What are you, working for an insurance company??
You need to start thinking like a scientist, and look for the BIG badabooms!

OK, so I'm really just a bored programmer expressing my urge for more excitement here... :-(

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It turned inside out?

And then it exploded.

-Galaxy Quest

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More succinctly: If the experiment confirms your hypothesis, it's a "measurement". If the experiment refutes your hypothesis, it's called a "discovery". -- :- Dabe

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And if you screw up and something useful happens that's serendipity. - me

Some background

Neutrino oscillations are a process by which different types of neutrino can turn into each other. The elementary particles (quarks, leptons and neutrinos) all come in three "families". We are made of the lightest family: up and down quarks (which are the constituents of protons and neutrons) and electrons. Members of the heavier families are unstable and decay rapidly into lighter particles.

However, it turns out that the weak nuclear interaction can mix quarks of different families. Down quarks turn out to be somewhat mixed with strange quarks of the next heaviest family due to this effect.

For a variety of reasons, it was natural to ask if neutrinos were mixed in the same way. In particular, this could account for the unexpected deficit of electron-type neutrinos from the sun [queensu.ca]. Various terrestrial experiments were done in the 80's and 90's to try to detect this effect, including LSND.

Neutrino experiments are extremely difficult and subject to all kinds of backgrounds, making them highly susceptible to errors in calibration and calculation. The LSND results were at odds with everything else that had been seen, but the stakes were high and no one wanted to give up on a result that might be right although it was not widely believed by people outside the LSND collaboration itself.

The experiment described in TFA has tried to independently reproduce the LSND results. This is somewhat easier to do than the original experiment because you can design things so that you are most sensitive to the most interesting region. They have failed to find the effect that the LSND result would predict if it was due to neutrino oscillations, and it is likely that this is the end of it.

The article never says so, but the most likely cause of the LSND result is some error in analysis, particularly in accounting for backgrounds and instrument effects. This kind of thing happens, particularly in neutrino physics, where the background processes are fundamentally many orders of magnitude stronger than the effects you are looking for, and have to be designed out with the most excruciating care.

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However, it turns out that the weak nuclear interaction can mix quarks of different families. Down quarks turn out to be somewhat mixed with strange quarks of the next heaviest family due to this effect.

All while Odo watches for "just one wrong move".

Is it just me

or other people as well think that the magnet explosion was no accident? I bet that now CERN scientist are going to retaliate by aiming their neutrino beam [web.cern.ch] at FermiLab trying to mess with their experiments.

Not an accident, but not Fermilab either

You're right, it wasn't an accident, but don't look to Fermilab. Who has the most to lose if we finally figure out the ultimate secrets of the universe? That's right...

God. The forbidden Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was just the first barrier

Wrong numbers = wrong results?

Go to the MiniBooNE web site [fnal.gov] and guess whether the photomultiplier tubes used to detect the event are either 1520 or 1280.
This could explain an error. At least in their web site, as the correct answer is 42, as everyone knows!

Cosmology predicted that ages ago

Cosmology predicted that quite some time ago as myself and collaborators show in this [arxiv.org] PRL paper from over a year ago. And there were many other papers with similar conclusions as well... The only problem is that particle physicists never believe cosmologists! :)

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You are confused. GP does refer to a proof that there is no sterile neutrino as claimed by LSND -- a proof based on cosmological data. The new "proof" is based on accelerator data. Good to see that they both give the same result.

Hardly salvaged...

Firstly nobody really believed he Los Alamos results principly because some of the collaborators removed their names from the original results paper and published another paper in the same journal issue in which they voiced considerable concern over the validity of the results. If you can't convince your own collaborators it is very hard to convince anyone else.

Secondly neutrino oscillations are not in the Standard Model and the problem with the LSND result was that it could not be reconciled with the other neutrino mising results from SNO and SuperK. So while this results is still very interesting it simply confirms that a simple neutrino mixing EXTENSION to the the Standard Model may be sufficien without needing to invoke more exotic alternatives.

Clarification

I submitted this story to Slashdot, but sadly, I see that my original wording has been altered by kdawson. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of my original post, but I would like to clarify what I *meant*. First of all, I do not consider this "good news" -- but "good results." The MiniBooNE team clearly worked very hard to get here so a big "Congrats" goes out to them. You could not rule out the LSND result, just because "we did not expect it" and "found it fishy." The unexpected results are sometimes the best ones and in science, remember: one scientist's junk is another scientist's signal. The CMB discovery story [wikipedia.org] is the best example to this. Secondly, the neutrino mass indeed does not belong in the standard model, which already several people have pointed out. What belongs in the standard model is the number of lepton families. It is good to see it confirmed that no "sterile" neutrino is needed to explain the results. Yes, cosmologists have had some say in the subject matter already, but it is good to see it confirmed. This is, afterall, how physics is done. "I told you so" is never a good thing to say in physics. You never know what comes out next afterall. I do not believe that Standard Model has been salvaged by this result nor do I want to live with the Standard Model for the rest of my life. There is already plenty of evidence that the Standard Model is not a sufficient model for explaining all the physical phenomena we observe and soon, I hope soon we will have evidence what that new "something" might be. At this point, I would also like to take this chance, as a physicist who works at CERN, to reply to the highly excited conspiracy theorists: Calm down! CERN, Fermilab and other physics labs are not part of corporate America! Yes, of course, I want CERN (and my experiment, in specific) to be the one who finds the Higgs, but I am willing to bet all my fortune, little as that may be, on that Fermilab's calculation mistake was not intentional. Yes, we, physicists are a funny bunch, with lots of things to argue and get excited about. But, we do have a common goal in life, to dig deeper into the mystery of the universe. And a common understanding -- that the truth *will* reveal itself and you can not determine when it does.

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It appears that nobody seems to be asking the next logical question: if the neutrinos aren't there, then what about the Sun?

Neutrinos are the required result of nuclear fusion within the Sun. They are not charged particles and they will travel through a light-year of lead. Now that Sudbury has been scrapped, there remains a severe deficit of neutrinos coming from the Sun for the nuclear fusion model.

They're not asking the question because that is not at all what this result implies. This result does not rule out all neutrino oscillations, but rather deals with a specific result (produced at Los Alamos, not Sudbury) which significantly complicated the

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It appears that nobody seems to be asking the next logical question: if the neutrinos aren't there, then what about the Sun?

The Sun is there. I checked. :-)