Fermilab Confirms Evidence of 4th Flavor Neutrino

eldavojohn writes "We've only had evidence for three kinds of neutrinos so far, but a recent test at Fermilab involving an antineutrino beam has reinforced a Michigan researcher's earlier experiment suggesting a fourth flavor. What's really odd about this is that a prior neutrino test (carried out as part of project MiniBooNE) did not result in indications of such strange oscillations. According to the researcher, 'The simplest explanation involves adding new neutrino-like particles, or sterile neutrinos, which do not have the normal weak interactions.' But this could also be an unknown or misunderstood effect. A Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist added that an explanation of this strange anomaly could result in understanding 'matter asymmetry of the universe, or why the universe is primarily composed of matter, rather than antimatter.' The results are published in the Physical Review Letters."

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I think "Not Interacting" with my taste buds is the same as never hitting my taste buds.

Re:Heim Theory?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, IANAPP (particle physicist), but I thought one of the things discrediting Heim Theory [wikipedia.org] was the prediction of more than 3 neutrinos. What does the presence of a fourth neutrino mean for other predictions made by the current model? Does this mean that Heim's predictions may have more credence?

I think the bigger issues would be the wildly incorrect values for extremely well-known parameters (90ish sigma away from the measured mass of the proton, for instance) and the prediction of a "neutral electron" at a mass that should make it appear in pretty much every particle physics experiment EVAR.

Re:Confused

[xigxag]

Idiocist!

Title and Summary overstates

[forand]

The scientific article does a reasonable job of making it clear that this result has a 0.5% probability of being produced entirely by background assuming that the systematics of the result are not playing evil games with you. While this result is interesting and it may, strictly speaking, "confirm evidence of 4th neutrino flavor" it only does so by being consistent with both a background fluctuation and some theories developed to describe a discrepancy similar to that seen in the data. It most certainly does not eliminate the standard model nor does it pick out any particular theory.

Re:Misleading title

[mako1138]

The way the story title is written is very bad. Strictly speaking, MiniBooNE has shown an excess of events which do not match Standard Model predictions, which may or may not be explained by the presence of an additional neutrino.

From the abstract, there is "a probability for consistency with the background-only hypothesis of 0.5%", which puts it into the "very suggestive" category rather than the "done deal" category.

Background info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Scintillator_Neutrino_Detector [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniBooNE [wikipedia.org]