What was the solution to the solar neutrino problem?
What is the solution to solar neutrino problem? The solution to this problem is the finding that neutrinos oscillate between three different types as they travel through space between the Sun and the Earth.
Do neutrinos interact with water?
In addition to the neutrino interactions visible in a regular water detector, a neutrino can break up the deuterium in heavy water. The resulting free neutron is subsequently captured, releasing a burst of gamma rays that can be detected. All three neutrino flavors participate equally in this dissociation reaction.
What role did South Dakota play in solving the solar neutrino problem?
That prompted Davis to build a neutrino collector — a tank holding 100,000 gallons of cleaning fluid — nearly a mile underground in South Dakota’s Homestake mine. Just one-third of solar neutrinos made it to Earth in a form Davis could have detected. The solution netted its discoverers the 2002 Nobel Prize in physics.
How are solar neutrinos observed?
In 1989, the Kamiokande experiment in Japan added to the confusion. The pure water detector found more neutrinos than Davis’s experiment, about half of the predicted number. Roughly two-thirds of the electron neutrinos coming from the sun were changing their flavor as they traveled, arriving as muon or tau neutrinos.
What is neutrino oscillation also explain the solar neutrino problem?
Neutrino oscillation is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which a neutrino created with a specific lepton family number (“lepton flavor”: electron, muon, or tau) can later be measured to have a different lepton family number.
Can we detect neutrinos?
The problem for physicists is that neutrinos are impossible to see and difficult to detect. So that neutrinos aren’t confused with cosmic rays (subatomic particles from outer space that do not penetrate the earth), detectors are installed deep underground.
How was the solar neutrino problem solved quizlet?
How was the solar neutrino problem solved? The solution to this problem is the finding that neutrinos oscillate between three different types as they travel through space between the Sun and the Earth.
Why are neutrinos so difficult to detect?
Why are neutrinos so hard to detect? Neutrinos are very hard to detect because they have no electric charge. But when a neutrino passes through matter, if it hits something dead-on, it will create electrically charged particles. And those can be detected.
Why do neutrinos oscillate?
Theory. Neutrino oscillation arises from mixing between the flavor and mass eigenstates of neutrinos. This results in a changing superposition mixture of mass eigenstates as the neutrino travels; but a different mixture of mass eigenstates corresponds to a different mixture of flavor states.
What is the neutrino problem in solar physics?
The solar neutrino problem concerned a large discrepancy between the flux of solar neutrinos as predicted from the Sun’s luminosity and as measured directly. Of the three types (flavors) of neutrinos known in the Standard Model of particle physics, the Sun produces only electron neutrinos.