Calculations showed that newly developed nuclear reactors should produce huge numbers of neutrinos - a large “neutrino flux” - as a byproduct. As often happens, developing technology led indirectly to a breakthrough in basic science. He himself thought that experimenters might never find proof of the existence of neutrinos. ![]() In other words, Pauli had invented a particle that would be almost impossible to observe. If he factored the neutrino into the picture, it would carry the missing energy and momentum.Ī careful accounting of the energy and momentum before and after the decay showed that if a particle were indeed slipping away undetected, it must be uncharged, or neutral, and must have practically no mass and almost no interactions with matter. To solve it, he proposed a new particle, the neutrino. The sum of energy and momentum after the decay event did not add up to the sum of energy and momentum before the decay event. He came up with the idea of the neutrino in response to a dilemma: He observed that, in the aftermath of a reaction in which a neutron transformed into a proton and electron, some energy and some angular momentum seemed to vanish. In 1930, the Austrian-born physicist Wolfgang Pauli predicted the existence of the particle we call the neutrino. A trillion naturally occurring neutrinos from the sun and other bodies in the galaxy pass through us each second.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |