Recent advancement in an international physics experiment run by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may provide evidence of how matter came to be in the universe.
Berkeley lab researchers, collaborating with 250 physicists and engineers worldwide to form the China-based Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, are working to decipher specific properties of neutrinos in order to answer questions about how they function through time and space.
The experiment is currently collecting data about the three “flavors” of neutrinos — electron, muon and tau — and how they morph and combine, which will explain how these particles came together when the universe was created, said William Edwards, a visiting scientist in the physics division at the Berkeley lab and project manager of the Daya Bay experiment.
James Siegrist, associate laboratory director for general sciences and director of the physics division at the Berkeley lab, said in an email that the experiment provides a foundation for humans to understand their place in the universe.
“The experiment will provide us with a high-precision measurement of one of the two unknown parameters in our model of neutrino physics,” Siegrist said. “Depending on the value of the parameter, it may or may not be the first such measurement — we’ll find out from results from competing experiments using different methods in the next year or two.”
“Mixing angles” — a mathematical method used to deduce neutrino oscillation — are helping researchers gather more data about the neutrino flavor mixing process, according to Edwards.
“What we are trying to do is fill in the last corner of the matrix of (mixing angles),” Edwards said. “We are looking to fill in theta one-three, the last mixing angle.”
He added that defining this final mixing angle is an ongoing phase of the project and could explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.
“These parameters are critical elements in our understanding of how all the antimatter vanished as the universe evolved,” Siegrist said in the email. “The small excess of matter over antimatter in the early universe is what allows us to exist today.”
The experiment delves into the nature of neutrinos, which were theorized back in the 1930s and discovered in the 1950s after scientists noticed missing energies in reactions, according to Edwards.
Researchers discovered the flavors of neutrinos — which are sometimes unstable, radioactive particles, according to Herbert Steiner, an emeritus professor in the UC Berkeley physics department and a member of the Daya Bay collaboration — in the following decades due to experimental evidence.
The Daya Bay experiment gathers data on the characteristic properties, such as the weight and height, of the neutrino flavors and their various interactions with each other.
“We know neutrinos have unique properties — they are very low mass, they are not charged due to being neutral … they oscillate between the three flavors,” Edwards said. “As they travel through time, they can change from one flavor to another.”
Steiner said that most experiments like Daya Bay do not have specific practical applications, but that they simply explain how things are created.
“We are trying to understand the whole sect of neutral particles and what role they play in our lives,” Steiner said. “This is pure science — we are just trying to understand why and how things happen.”
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