antineutrino

If a difference were to be found between the rates of oscillations of separate neutrino and antineutrino beams, that would be proof of the imbalance between matter and antimatter.

By recording the antineutrino output of nuclear reactors, detectors can discern the relative amounts of plutonium and uranium, the raw materials for making nuclear weapons.

The result is very exciting, because it essentially allows us to compare neutrino and antineutrino oscillations in the future and see how different they are and hopefully have an answer to the question, Why do we exist?

Neutrinos had been detected but only in the form of antineutrinos produced by nuclear fission reactors (see 1956).

Scientists have long theorized that a "neutrinoless" version - wherein two antineutrinos (or neutrinos) annihilate each other - also exists.

To this end, "blind" stars are introduced, consisting of neutrino and antineutrino, in which their annihilation creates electron/positron pairs to participate in the next charged star (Fig.

A new map flags which areas of the planet emit an abundance of these particles, marking antineutrino hot spots in red, Meghan Rosen wrote in "Map captures sources of Earth's antineutrino glow" (SN: 10/3/15, p.

Using the Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) located under a mountain in Japan, they analyzed geoneutrinos -emitted by decaying radioactive materials within the Earth.

The shock provides the energy to produce many more particles, including a wave of neutrino-antineutrino pairs of all flavors with energies up to 20 MeV (the antineutrino being the neutrino's antimatter counterpart).

Although antineutrinos scarcely interact with other particles, every once in a while one out of trillions will collide squarely with a proton, converting it to a neutron (the opposite of the change that produced the antineutrino in the first place) and liberating an antielectron (positron) as well.

For scientists still looking for these particles, the 5 MeV antineutrino anomaly detected by the NEOS experiment, (http://physicsworld.

However, to monitor foreign reactors from a distance, these large detectors must be buried underground to avoid cosmic radiation, which contributes to background noise that interferes with the antineutrino signal.

Accordingly, two types of neutrinos are possible there: a pair of left-right rotation and, conversely, a pair of right-left rotation, obviously, as a neutrino and an antineutrino.

Usman's team pieced together data, including measurements from detectors in Italy and Japan, to build a Technicolor map of antineutrino abundance.

The most highly developed Penning trap presently at hand needs still a drastic improvement and ground-breaking ideas in order to achieve the two scientific goals of the present grant application: (i), determination of the Q-value of the decay 187Re to 187Os with an accuracy of delta_m/m = 10^(-11) as required for the MARE I campaign aiming at a determination of the mass of the electron antineutrino via a very careful determination and analysis of the beta spectrum; (ii), measurement of the masses of superheavy nuclei (Z less or equal to 118) produced by hot fusion process enabling a clear assignment of the proton number to the different isotopes (and by this also the naming of the elements discovered by hot fusion) and making possible tests of state-of-the-art nuclear theories.