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Electron Neutrinos and

Antineutrinos
The electron neutrino (a lepton) was first postulated in 1930 by Fermi to
explain why the electrons in beta decay were not emitted with the full
reaction energy of the nuclear transition. The apparent violation of
conservation of energy and momentum was most easily avoided by
postulating another particle. Fermi called the particle a neutrino, but it was
not experimentally observed until 1953. This elusive particle has no charge
and almost no mass, so could penetrate vast thicknesses of material without
interaction. The mean free path of a neutrino in water would be on the order
of 10x the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In the standard Big Bang
model, the neutrinos left over from the creation of the universe are the most
abundant particles in the universe. This remnant neutrino density is put at Index
100 per cubic centimeter at an effective temperature of 2K (Simpson). The
background temperature for neutrinos is lower than that for the microwave References
background (2.7K) because the neutrino transparency point came earlier. Kearns, et
The sun emits vast numbers of neutrinos which can pass through the earth al.
with little or no interaction. This leads to the statement "Solar neutrinos
shine down on us during the day, and shine up on us during the night!" . Simpson
Bahcall's modeling of the solar neutrino flux led to the prediction of about 5
x 106 neutrinos/cm2s. Bahcall

A remarkable opportunity for observing neutrinos came with Supernova

1987A when the Japanese observing team detected neutrinos almost
coincident with the discovery of the light from the supernova.

Neutrinos interact only by the weak interaction. Their interactions are

usually represented in terms of Feynman diagrams.

Neutrinos as leptons Role in supernova Other neutrino types

Detection of neutrinos Does the neutrino have any mass?
Why do we say that neutrinos are left-handed?
Neutrino cross-section for interaction

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Detection of Neutrinos
The first experimental observation of the neutrino interacting with matter was
made by Frederick Reines, Clyde Cowan, Jr, and collaborators in 1956 at the
Savannah River Plant in South Carolina. Their neutrino source was a nuclear

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reactor (it actually produced antineutrinos from beta decay).

Modern neutrino detectors at

IMB in Ohio and
Kamiokande in Japan
detected neutrinos from
Supernova 1987A. A new
neutrino detector at Sudbury,
Ontario began collecting
data in October of 1999.
Another Japanese neutrino Index
detector called Super
Kamiokande became Reference
operational in April 1996. McDonald,
Klein &
Wark
An early set of experiments with a facility called the solar neutrino telescope,
measured the rate of neutrino emission from the sun at only one third of the
expected flux. Often referred to as the Solar Neutrino Problem, this deficiency
of neutrinos has been difficult to explain. Recent results from the Sudbury
Neutrino Observatory suggest that a fraction of the electron neutrinos produced
by the sun are transformed into muon neutrinos on the way to the earth. The
observations at Sudbury are consistent with the solar models of neutrino flux
assuming that this "neutrino oscillation" is responsible for observation of
neutrinos other than electron neutrinos.

Cherenkov Radiation

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Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

The new Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) consists of a 1000 metric
ton bottle of heavy water suspended in a larger tank of light water. The
apparatus is located in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada at a depth of about 2 km
down in a nickel mine. A 18 m diameter geodesic array of 9,500
photomultiplier tubes surrounds the heavy water to detect Cerenkov
radiation from the neutrino interaction which dissociates deuterium:

Show other detection reactions for

SNO

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The distinctive characteristic of the heavy water observatory is that it can

measure both the electron neutrino flux and the total neutrino flux (electron,
muon and tau neutrinos). It should allow them to determine whether
neutrinos change flavors. If so, it could explain the solar neutrino problem
and would show that the neutrinos have mass.

SNO began operating in production mode in October, 1999, and as of

Summer 2000 had collected a sizable number of neutrino events both from
the sun (the main focus of the experiment) and from atmospheric events
with pions and muons. The Cerenkov cones of the solar neutrinos center
about the direction opposite the sun, showing about the same flux at night
as during the day. This was an expected result, since the mean free path of a
neutrino in matter is about 22 lightyears in lead and having the earth in the Index
path makes little difference. A sizable number of the atmospheric neutrino
events come from below, having traveled all the way through the earth and Reference
forming the Cerenkov cone in the photomultiplier tubes at the top of the Feder
spherical heavy-water ball. These Cerenkov cones are scattered all around
the sphere, while the solar ones of course show a precise anti-solar Simpson
direction.
McDonald,
The depth of the detector protects it from the intense bombardment of Klein &
cosmic ray muons which reaches the earth's surface. The detector measures Wark
only about 70 muon events per day, and they are easily distinguished from
neutrino events since the muon interacts by the electromagnetic interaction
and produces a much larger signal in the detector array.

In order to detect the ring of light which is the signature of Cerenkov

radiation, the responses of all the photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) are
monitored with a very short time scale. In order to be counted as an "event"
in the detector, at least 20 PMTs must be triggered within an interval of 100
nanoseconds.

How SNO detects neutrinos

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The Solar Neutrino Telescope

Raymond Davis of Brookhaven National Laboratory constructed a neutrino
detector 1.6 km underground in the Homestake Gold Mine in Lead, South
Dakota. The detector consists of a 378,000 liter tank of perchloroethylene,
which is further isolated by being submerged in water. Theoretical expections
were about one neutrino-chlorine interaction per day, but the measured solar
neutrino events were about a third of that, raising serious questions about the
abundance of solar neutrinos (the Solar Neutrino Problem).

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The detection of neutrinos by this instrument was based on the interaction of

neutrinos with chlorine nuclei to produce argon. The argon can be removed
from the tank and measured so that the number of neutrinos captured in a given
time interval can be determined.

Index

Reference
The argon decays back to the chlorine isotope from which it was created by the Simpson
process of electron capture. The detection of this transition is aided by the
definite energy of the x-ray emitted during the electron capture process. This
mine experiment was able to detect about 15 argon atoms a month, according to
Simpson.

Perchloroethylene is ordinary dry-cleaning fluid, but

400,000 gallons is a lot of cleaning fluid. Davis denies the
story that he was besieged by wire coat-hanger salesmen
after the large purchase.

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Detection of Supernova Neutrinos

Since the neutrino can pass through the entire Earth without interaction, it
takes specialized techniques to detect one. After being postulated by Fermi in
1930 to explain anomalies in beta decay, they were not actually detected
until 1953 by Reines and Cowan.

Detection of neutrinos is now well developed and a classic opportunity for

neutrino detection occurred with Supernova 1987A. A burst of ten neutrinos
was detected within a time interval of about 15 seconds at a neutrino detector
deep in a mine in Japan. They had to penetrate the Earth to get to the Index
detector.

More detail

Energies in eV

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Neutrino Mass?
No definite mass has been measured for the neutrino, and the standard
comment about most experiments is "the results are consistent with zero
mass for the neutrino". But this raises certain theoretical problems and there
have been many attempts to set a range for the mass of the neutrino. Since
its mass is evidently very small, if non-zero, the mass is usually stated in
terms of its energy equivalent in electron volts. Most experiments conclude
that the mass equivalent of the neutrino is less than 50 eV.

One of the recent pieces of information about neutrino mass came from the
Index
neutrinos observed from Supernova 1987A. Ten neutrinos arrived within 15
seconds of each other after traveling 180,000 light years, and they differed
References
by a up to factor of three in energy. This limits the neutrino rest mass
Rohlf
energy to less than about 30 eV (Rohlf).
Kearns, et
New experimental evidence from the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector al.
in Japan represents the strongest evidence to date that the mass of the
neutrino is non-zero. Models of atmospheric cosmic ray interactions suggest
twice as many muon neutrinos as electron neutrinos, but the measured ratio
was only 1.3:1. The interpretation of the data suggested a mass difference
between electron and muon neutrinos of 0.03 to 0.1 eV. Presuming that the
muon neutrino would be much more massive than the electron neutrino,
then this implies a muon neutrino mass upper bound of about 0.1 eV.

The recent neutrino measurements at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory are

consistent with the modeled total neutrino flux and add evidence for
neutrino oscillation, a process which can only occur if the neutrinos have
mass.

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