why are the particles strange?
Researchers working in Antarctica have been trying to understand the behavior of a mysterious new particle, that could hint at the existence of a mirror universe where time flows backwards.
www.dailymail.co.uk
Researchers working in Antarctica have been trying to understand the behavior of a mysterious new particle.
Some suggest it's evidence that during the Big Bang a second universe was created that mirrors our own, consisting mainly of antimatter, and in which time flows backward....
But then the researchers, led by University of Hawaii's Peter Gorham, realized their data showed the exact opposite of what they had been looking for: a stream of high energy particles traveling out of the Earth's surface and into space.
The particles were believed to be tau neutrinos, a type of slow moving particle that has the capacity to temporarily transform into a high energy particle called a tau lepton before returning to its low energy state.
SPOILER ALERT! ! !
Strange data captured by an instrument in Antarctica didn't provide proof of a parallel universe, the instrument's principal investigator says. The quest to understand neutrinos, strange particles that are prevalent in the universe, is ongoing.
www.cnn.com
ANITA was designed to detect cosmic ray particle showers through radio signals either on their way down to the ice, or traveling back up after bouncing off of it.
And during its flights, ANITA found high-energy fountains of particles coming from the ice, a kind of upside-down shower of cosmic rays.
Neutrinos come in three flavors, essentially: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos. Although these are charged particle cousins with unique properties, there are limited ways of distinguishing between them, Gorham said....
The tau neutrino has an interesting feature in that it regenerates. These neutrinos have short lifetimes, but when they decay at high energies, they produce another tau neutrino, as well as a particle called a tau lepton, and so forth. This means they are more likely to get through than other neutrinos.
And if this decay occurs in the atmosphere, it creates a cascade of particles like a cosmic ray.
Coincidentally, ANITA is sensitive to ultra-high energy cosmic rays that rain down on Earth and create a radio burst that acts like a flashlight beam of radio waves.
ANITA's unique perspective means that it's looking down at the ice, in the same direction of a beam that would rain down and reflect off the surface of the ice.
When ANITA watches a cosmic ray, the flashlight beam is really a burst of radio waves a billionth of a second long that can be mapped, like a wave, with a certain order of crests and troughs to show how it reflects off the ice — likely in reverse.
But twice in their data from ANITA flights, the researchers spotted what looked to be the eruption of a high energy particle coming up through the ice. The crest and trough order were not reversed.
Low energy neutrinos may be able to pass through our planet unscathed, but high energy neutrinos would experience more of a hard stop — and not erupt from the ice.
The researchers had a thought. Perhaps if a tau neutrino was spreading through the Earth and escaping the ice, regenerating along the way, it would create a similar radio flashlight beam pointing up at ANITA...
"It is clear however that these events cannot be neutrinos that have traversed the Earth and somehow escaped detection by IceCube," Halzen said.
"The conclusion is that they must have come from above and have reflected off the ice into the ANITA detector without leaving any signature in the deep ice where IceCube would have recorded them.
"ANITA observes such events routinely; they are cosmic rays reflecting off the ice surface. The anomaly is that two events did not change polarization when reflected. This is either the result of new physics, or of some unanticipated way that particles can reflect from the polar ice cap's surface."
Gorham said that there is inevitable tension between the results of ANITA and IceCube because they aren't seeing the same things and they don't know how to resolve that yet. They are very different detectors using different methods.
.
