How physicists track and trap the elusive neutrino(quantamagazine.org) |
How physicists track and trap the elusive neutrino(quantamagazine.org) |
Whatever gravity “trap” you make is going to pale in comparison to the gravity wells around us (earth, the sun, etc) and the weak force scales exponentially with energy. So a slow-moving neutrino would interact even less with the weak force than a relativistic one.
The Super Kamiokande had a terrible engineering event where the delicate sensor bulbs shattered, and the pressure delta from one shattering caused neighbors to shatter, in a chain reaction that destroyed large amounts of sensors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoBFjD5tn_E
Unrelated:
>Neutrinos come in three different “flavors” (electron, muon, and tau) and can oscillate, or switch, between them. To do so, neutrinos must have mass
Why? What actually is "Neutrino oscillation" and why does it require the neutrino have mass? My already feeble understanding of particle and quantum physics always breaks down at these sorts of points.
How are we sure that the neutrino is in fact a single particle that should use the same sort of mathematical machinery as all others? Am I even asking a question that means something? I know literally every physicist ever graduated has spent time thinking everything in physics is wrong and tried poking at such ideas, so I guess I'm more interested in what those kids end up finding that brings them back to "No this makes more sense" of neutrinos in the standard model.
For a particle to "oscillate", it must "experience" time. All massless particles travel at the speed of light. As a consequence of special relativity, they don't "experience" time.
Therefore, neutrinos must be traveling slower than light, and they must have mass.