Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Observation of HighEnergy
Neutrino Reactions and the Existence
of Two Kinds of Neutrinos
Trip Adler
June 24, 1962
Background on Neutrinos
• Fermions with halfinteger spin
• Lefthanded chirality
• Electrically neutral
• Interacts only by weak force
• Very small cross section (for neutrinos
produced in the sun, it would take about one
lightyear of lead to block half of them)
History of Neutrinos
• First postulated in 1931 by Pauli to explain the
energy spectrum of beta decays
• Postulated again in 1947 by Powell to explain the
“kink” observed in pion decay
• Experimentally observed in 1956 by Cowan and
Reines by setting up a large tank of water and
watching the “inverse” betadecay reaction
• Davis and Harmer established that there are
neutrinos and antineutrinos in 1959
• Concept of conservation of electron number and
muon number has been introduced to explain why
some reactions occur and some do not
Motivation for Experiment
• The reaction µ —> e + is never observed (why?)
• Recently was postulated that if there were two
kinds of neutrino, one associated with the electron
(ve) and one with the muon (vµ), then all allowed
and forbidden processes can be accounted for:
n —> p+ + e + ve
π + —> µ+ + vµ
µ+ —> e+ + ve + vµ
• But until now there has never been any
experimental confirmation of this
• At the same time, there are no methods of studying
the weak force at high energies
The Experiment
• If only one type of neutrino, the following two
reactions should take place at the same rate:
v + p+ —> n + µ+
v + p+ —> n + e+
• To test this, neutrino beam generated as follows:
– Pions were produced by 15BeV protons striking Be
target
– Pions decayed according to the following reactions:
π+ —> µ+ + v
π —> µ + v
• Lots and lots of shielding used so that only
neutrinos from this reaction and no cosmic rays
interact with detector
• Spark chamber used to detect neutrino interactions
The Accelerator
• The Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) in
Brookhaven, New York
• Particles are stored in a storage ring
• 240 magnets used to focus the particles and curve their
tracks
• Microwave cavities accelerate the particles
The shielding
• 13.5 meters of steel from a dismantled warship
used to filter out unwanted particles
• Large amounts of concrete to filter cosmic rays
• Additional filtering factor:
– Beam would hit spark chamber for only 2 microseconds
– This short time window allowed for the exclusion of events
that took place outside this window, which were caused by
cosmic radiation
The Detector
• Used a spark chamber
– Consisted of 90 aluminum plates,
weighing a total of 10 tons
– Neon gas sandwiched between plates
• If any neutrino interact with
aluminum nuclei to produce
charged particles, the particles
would ionize the gas
• Then, under the influence of an
electric field, the gas would spark
where ionized, revealing the path
of the newly created particles
• Photos of such paths were taken
The Data
• In an exposure of 3.48 x 1017 protons, a total of
113 events observed
– 34 “single muon” events
– 22 “vertex” events
– 49 “short single track” events
– 8 “shower” events
• The 56 “single muon” and “vertex” events will be
called “events,” and resulted in muon production
• The “short single track” events have too little
momentum to be muons, and the “shower” events
are not muons
The Data (Cont.)
Single muon events Vertex events
Shower events
Interpretation of Data
• We know the events are not produced by cosmic rays
– Ran experiment with AGS off, and without gating requirements
– Determined that 1 in 90 cosmic ray events are neutrino events
– The actual experiment ran for a total of 5.5 sec, with gating,
and in this case 46 cosmic neutrino events (of the 56 events
observed) would be expected
• We know that neutrinos produced were the decay
products of pions and K mesons:
– Ran experiment with 4 feet less of steel
– This reduces path available for pions to decay
– Reduced rate of events, confirming the source of neutrinos
Interpretation of Data (cont.)
• Events are not neutron produced
– Are uniformly distributed throughout volume of spark
chamber
– Second background run (with less steel) did not
increase events rate, which shows that shield is
sufficient
• The single particles produced are presumed to be
muons, because they show little or no nuclear
interaction
– No large angle or charge exchange scattering observed
– The mean free path for nuclear interactions is less than
100 cm of aluminum, so the mean free path for the
observed single tracks is more than 8 times this length
Interpretation of Data (Cont.)
• If only one type of neutrino, the following two
reactions should take place at the same rate:
v + p+ —> n + µ+
v + p+ —> n + e+
• This means that there should have been on the
order of 29 electron showers
• However, only 6 showers were observed, and
these were qualitatively different from normal
electron showers (probably neutron produced stars
or from the decays of K+ or K20)
• In conclusion, ve ≠ vµ
Other Conclusions/Questions
• The intermediate boson
– If the mass of the intermediate boson is less than that of
the proton, it could have been produced in the process
v + p+ —> w+ + p+ + µ
– This is consistent with 5 of our vertex events
– More experiments should be conducted on this using a
chamber with higher resolution
• Other questions about neutrinos
– Could there be a third neutrino?
– Could there be neutrino flavor oscillations?
Bibliography
• Observation of HighEnergy Neutrino Reactions and the Existence of Two
Kinds of Neutrinos. Phys. Rev. Lett. 9, 36 (1962)
• Griffiths, David. Introduction to Elementary Particles. Wiley, 1987
• Essays of an Information Scientist: Creativity, Delayed Recognition, and
other Essays, Vol:12, p.216, 1989. Current Contents, #32, p.39, 1989
• Press Release: The 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics:
http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1988/press.html
• Brookhaven National Laboratory Website:
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/facilities/AGS.asp
Leon Lederman,
Melvin Schwartz,
and Jack Steinberger
won the Nobel Prize
in 1988 for their
discovery