What are neutrino particles and why mankind can not study them?

Do you know what the most expensive substance onlight is antimatter? According to NASA official data, one milligram of the positrons of this rare substance costs about $ 25 million! At the same time, it is hardly possible to obtain antimatter in the laboratory due to the fact that all earlier attempts to create a unique source of energy were defeated. Why? It seems that the answer to this question may be hidden in very common and at the same time mysterious particles - neutrinos.

Neutrino could be the key to getting pure antimatter

What is antimatter?

In physics, antimatter is justThe "opposite" of matter. The fact is that antimatter particles always have the same mass as their counterparts, while possessing slightly different “inverted” properties. So, protons in a substance have a positive charge, and antiprotons have a negative charge. Antimatter can theoretically be created in laboratory conditions when high-energy particles collide, however, these events almost always create equal parts of both antimatter and matter, and when two opposite particles come into contact with each other, both are destroyed in a powerful wave of pure energy.

See also: Physicists have proved that antimatter is a mirror image of ordinary matter

What puzzles physicists is that almosteverything in the universe, including humans, consists of matter, and not of equal parts of matter and antimatter. In search of ideas that could explain what keeps our universe from creating separate galaxies of antimatter, the researchers found some evidence that the answer might be hidden in very common but poorly studied particles known to mankind as neutrinos.

Can neutrinos interact in antimatter?

In order to be able to answer questions aboutthe nature of antimatter, a team of researchers led by Christopher Moher recently published the results of the first set of experiments aimed at studying the properties of neutrinos. So, according to the plans of scientists, in the very near future, a special deep-sea neutrino experiment (DUNE) can be carried out by a person, which is the creation of an experimental setup for studying neutrino science and particle physics.

In order to understand the nature of the interaction of neutrinos and antimatter, scientists plan to create a unique underground tool called DUNE

In order to be able to answer questions aboutthe nature of antimatter, a team of researchers led by Christopher Moher recently published the results of the first set of experiments aimed at studying the properties of neutrinos. So, according to the plans of scientists, in the very near future, a special deep-sea neutrino experiment (DUNE) can be carried out by a person, which is the creation of an experimental setup for studying neutrino science and particle physics.

Currently, well-known collidersparticles, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, conduct experiments on quarks - particles that “construct” protons and neutrons of the atomic nucleus. Thanks to the experiments, some evidence was found that matter and antimatter are really symmetrical. At the same time, experiments on leptons - light particles weakly interacting with matter, hint that these particles could more fully explain the universal asymmetry of standard matter and antimatter.

The problem with studying neutrinos isthat such tiny particles rarely interact with other particles. The discovery of these rare interactions means that researchers need to study large numbers of neutrinos over long periods of time. In addition, the constant flux of muons formed as a result of the interaction of cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere can complicate the detection of already infrequent interactions.

This is interesting: How do neutrino detectors work?

Researchers believe that in order to solveSuch a problem, which threatens the study of neutrino particles, we need to go down about one and a half kilometers inland, building several 10-ton detectors and filling them with liquid argon from the inside. Immediately after this, scientists suggest launching a neutrino beam towards the installation, which must be preliminarily made in a nearby particle accelerator. According to the authors of the DUNE program, this facility will be placed by 2022 at the Sanford Underground Research Center near Chicago, and perhaps it will be able to help in the study of the interaction properties of neutrinos and antimatter.

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Despite the fact that the study of neutrino particlesmay take more than a dozen years, the authors believe that the DUNE project can not only answer many seemingly insoluble questions from the field of astrophysics, mathematics and particle physics, but it may even contain the key to understanding how and why you and I could appear in our universe. But this is already exciting.