Fermilab experiment sees neutrinos change over 500 miles | Hacker News Reader

Fermilab experiment sees neutrinos change over 500 miles

fnal.gov

58 pointswfunction14 comments

If you for some reason find yourself in the west suburbs of Chicago I would definitely go visit Fermilab. I went during a Sunday and got to watch a lecture/demonstration and then take a tour and talk with real scientists that work there. The grounds are huge and you can also ride your bike through. I used to live nearby so I biked there all the time.

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/visiting/index.html

Note: While impressive, and a technical milestone for NOvA, this is still in the realms of known physics. The exciting parts will come as the quantities of data ramp up and we can probe unknown areas of physics.

See also; articles about "First Collisions" every time the LHC turns on again.

Everyone can't all go work on the LHC. Even the lowly work of refining measurements of known phenomena is important and necessary.

My comparison with the LHC was in particular to reporting "first collisions" - whilst an impressive technical accomplishment, the physics measurements come later. There is nothing 'lowly' about measuring any of the fundamental parameters.

Or some of us worked on the LHC (tier 1 data taking at Fermilab) and it was a terrible gig.

I had a terrible gig there too! It (BTeV) died young.

Actually, neutrino properties are not explained fully by the current "Standard Model" of particle physics: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/february-2013/neutri...

For example, the Standard Model predicts that neutrinos should be massless, but we know from experimental results that they do have mass. So while these neutrino experiments may not be "unknown physics" (in the sense of totally novel results) they are exploring "unexplained physics" that is not predicted by the widely accepted theoretical models.

Don't confuse my statement of "Realms of known physics" with "The Standard Model". And i'm fully aware of the state of neutrino physics, and what is and isn't known.

My point is that this is a technical milestone, not a knowledge-of-physics one - we have seen plenty of evidence for neutrino flavour changing, at much better precision than the current results for NOvA, just not in this particular experiment - yet.

Wouldn't it be interesting if neutrinos shared properties with photons?

Ha! I immediately thought of the 500 miles bug.

For the uninitiated: http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

The icing: all the niggling details of system calls and signal propagation are handled in the FAQ http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

Through the earth huh? What's the latency of this thing? Can we send a quote from Chicago to New York faster than the microwave link? Who wants to form a company?

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/mar/19/neutrin...

The immediate problem is that you need to send a huge number of neutrinos to be able to detect anything, so cost and bandwidth are prohibitive. In the proof of concept cited in your link, the experimenters used a 120 GeV beam to send a 0.1 bits/sec signal. (http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com