"Since the 1990s, physicists have pondered the tantalizing possibility of an exotic fourth type of neutrino, dubbed the "sterile" neutrino, that doesn't interact with regular matter at all, apart from its fellow neutrinos, perhaps. But definitive experimental evidence for sterile neutrinos has remained elusive. Now it looks like the latest results from Fermilab's MiniBooNE experiment have ruled out the sterile neutrino entirely, according to a paper published in the journal Nature."
"It all dates back to the so-called "solar neutrino problem." Physicists detected the first solar neutrinos from the Sun in 1966. The only problem was that there were far fewer solar neutrinos being detected than predicted by theory, a conundrum that became known as the solar neutrino problem. In 1962, physicists discovered a second type ("flavor") of neutrino, the muon neutrino. This was followed by the discovery of a third flavor, the tau neutrino, in 2000."
Physicists considered a non-interacting fourth neutrino, the sterile neutrino, to explain anomalous oscillation signals. Early solar neutrino detections found fewer electron neutrinos than predicted, revealing the solar neutrino problem. SNO showed that missing electron neutrinos had oscillated into other flavors, proving that neutrinos have mass and that three flavor states arise from mixtures of mass states. Results from LSND and earlier MiniBooNE hinted at muon-to-electron oscillations beyond the three-flavor framework, motivating sterile-neutrino models. The newest MiniBooNE measurements fail to confirm a sterile state and rule out the sterile neutrino as the cause of those anomalies.
Read at Ars Technica
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