Neutrinos: Why Do These "Useless" Ghost Particles Exist?

this video is sponsored by Masterworks the image that you're looking at is that of the Sun but here's the astounding part it was not taken looking up at the sky but taken looking down at the Earth how the heck is that possible well this is a photo of the neutrino emission of the sun neutrinos are so small and interacts so little with other particles that nearly all of them pass right through the 12 700 kilometer diameter of the earth without hitting a single atom the sun produces a mind-boggling 10 to the 38 neutrinos every second in fact a hundred trillion neutrinos are passing through your body every second right now don't be alarmed though they're harmless you can't feel them whatsoever because they're not interacting with anything they're kind of like a ghost that can pass right through walls in fact it's estimated that a single neutrino could pass through a one light year thick chunk of lead without hitting anything so the question you might ask if they don't interact with anything what purpose do they serve nothing is built from these particles they're seemingly useless yet they're everywhere and in fact you wouldn't exist without them how can this be what are these ghost particles and what purpose do they serve in the workings of the universe that's coming up right now [Music] foreign I think you're going to be fascinated by the story of neutrinos which you'll find are really responsible for everything but before I get into that I want to acknowledge Masterworks for sponsoring this video it's been a tough year headlines are filled with caution inflation is high and the financial system is suffering radical shock like a sudden banking collapse even if your portfolio is Diversified you're probably still suffered losses maybe a modern approach is needed to diversify this is Goldman Sachs saying that real assets can help Salvage lost returns real assets like Fine Art Goldman says that R can protect your purchasing power in fact the last time inflation was 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description I just found Masterworks to be a great way to diversify for myself and I think it's worth a look and now back to neutrinos neutrinos are one of the most mysterious particles we know of and although they may appear to serve no useful functions they are in fact very important for one thing they're ubiquitous they are the second most abundant particles we know of after photons when a supernova explodes 98 of the energy is carried by neutrinos within the first 10 seconds not photons as you might have thought they don't carry a charge and they interact very weakly this is why they can go right through the Earth without interacting with anything you might ask if they go right through the Earth right through our bodies and they probably go right through our instruments so how the heck did we ever know they even existed well they were first theorized in 1930 by none other than Wolfgang Paoli who is perhaps most well known for the power the Exclusion Principle trying to solve a known conundrum in physics at the time the conundrum was that some of the energy in a radioactive beta Decay appeared to be missing a beta decay occurs when an atom has too many neutrons or protons in its nucleus when there are too many neutrons the nucleus becomes more stable by transforming a neutron into a proton this is called a beta minus decay process emits an electron scientists had noticed that the electron which was emitted did not always have the same energy sometimes it had more and sometimes it had less but since the proton always had a fixed value for its mass they couldn't understand how the electron's energy varied this appeared to violate a sacrosanct principle in physics the principle of conservation of energy Paulie proposed that perhaps a second invisible particle was being emitted along with the electron which carried the different energies allowing for overall energy to be conserved but if it existed it became clear that it must be neutral in order to conserve charge be very light and weakly interacting because it was not easily detected Enrico Fermi soon after coined the term neutrino for this as yet undiscovered particle now the question you have to ask how were they experimentally detected if they don't interact with anything well what's favorable for detection is the fact that they are so extremely abundant to the tune of a hundred trillion going through your body every second it turns out that if you build a detector large enough and leave it on for long enough a small percentage of these neutrinos will interact often enough that we can detect them in fact there were confirmed experimentally in 1956 26 years after first being theorized by physicists Fred reins and Clyde Cohen for which a Nobel Prize was later awarded their detector weighed 10 tons and was placed near a powerful fission reactor the fission infusion processes produce a lot of neutrinos for example the tremendous Fusion reactions inside stars like our sun is the reason these particles are so abundant how are they produced in the fusion process when the sun fuses hydrogen to helium this is a multi-step process the end result of which turns four protons into a helium nucleus consisting of two protons and two neutrons produces two positrons and two neutrinos now you might say if that's the case we should be as bombarded with streams of positrons as we are with neutrinos why doesn't that happen the reason is because neutrinos don't interact with anything and pretty much pass right through the Sun and onto the Earth the positrons on the other hand being the anti-particle of electrons are immediately annihilated by electrons in the plasma of the Sun to produce high energy photons or gamma rays but by the time they make it out of the sun's core we see them as mostly visible light so we should be thankful that we are bombarded by visible light instead of positrons or gamma rays the neutrino emission from the Sun is where this particle gets a little weird and the Mystery of its mass comes about they were initially thought to be massless but we now believe that they do have mass because the neutrinos from the sun went missing what do I mean by this we know how many neutrinos are supposed to be produced by nuclear reactions in the Sun and these can be detected right here on Earth however we didn't detect nearly as many neutrinos as we should have this was called the solar neutrino problem so where did this missing neutrino go well it turns out the neutrinos like all fermions actually come in three different types called flavors the flavors are electron neutrinos muon neutrinos and Tau neutrinos electron neutrinos were the ones we were looking for but when we learned how to detect the other two flavors muon and Tau neutrinos suddenly the missing neutrinos could be accounted for somehow they changed from electron neutrinos to muon and Tau on their way here from the Sun this changing of flavors can only happen if these three particles have a non-zero Mass now what do flavors have to do with their mess well this is where the weirdness comes from I'll give you the simple answer then I'll give you the more complicated answer the simple answer is that in order for flavor change to happen some passing of time must occur for the particles in other words if no time passed for the particle then no change could happen but since flavor change does occur time must be passing for them if time is passing for them then they must be traveling less than the speed of light because at the speed of light no time passes as is the case for photons now if they're traveling less than the speed of light this means they must have some Mass because physics dictates that if they had no Mass they must travel at the speed of light now here's a simplified version of the more complicated answer remember the uncertainty principle in quantum physics where particle cannot have a precise position and a precise momentum at the same time that is when a particle has a well-defined position then it will not have a precise momentum and when it has a well-defined momentum it doesn't have a precise position in other words if we know how fast it's going we don't know where it is and if we know where it is we don't know how fast it's going something similar seems to be going on with neutrino mass and flavor when a neutrino has a precise Mass its flavor is mixed when it has a precise flavor its mass is mixed so what appears to be happening is that on its way to Earth the neutrino is in a kind of superposition or a mixed state of various possible masses and flavors this is called neutrino oscillation unlike the uncertainty principle there's no reason why we should not be able to measure the mass of the neutrinos in principle the mass could be measured but they're just so light and non-interactive that we don't have a way to pin down its masses precisely at least not yet the probability of it flipping or oscillating between the electron and muon neutrino flavors can be precisely calculated and observations confirm this the source of this neutrino mass and hence the oscillation is the mystery we don't know why they oscillate and this needs to be explained but because this flipping or oscillation occurs we know there must be some Mass even though we don't know the mechanism of this Mass we just know that there are three neutrino flavors and three neutrino masses we also know that the electron neutrino Mass cannot be more than about 0.8 electron volts which is on the order of a millionth of the mass of the electron now you might say why is the mass a mystery why can't we explain it using the Higgs field which is the source of mass for all the other massive Elementary particles in order to understand why I have to explain in a simplified way how the Higgs Field confers Mass we can consider that the Higgs flips the handedness or chirality of fermias if it interacts with them so when we say that the mass of the electron is created by its interactions with the Higgs field we can think of this as the Higgs field rapidly changing a left-handed electron into a right-handed electron and vice versa this switching back and forth is energy and because energy and mass are equivalent via E equals m c squared this energy shows up as its rest Mass a heavier particle like the top Quark would experience this flipping at a much higher frequency than a lighter particle like the electron and that's why it would have a higher Mass this mechanism however doesn't work for the neutrino because it stays in its left-handed State forever right-handed neutrinos don't exist or at least we've never detected them so this is why they're thought not to interact with the Higgs so the source of the mass of the Nutrena remains a mystery and seems to point to new as yet undiscovered physics and it confirms that the standard model is incomplete which is not a bad thing because this could be an exciting area of research for future physicists now I stated in the intro that we wouldn't exist without neutrinos how could I make such a strong statement for one thing although their mass is Tiny there are so many neutrinos in the universe that their abundance results and then playing a very important role in the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe such as the distribution of galaxies and remember the beta plus Decay I talked about inside the Sun or without it Fusion would not occur so the sun wouldn't Shine without neutrinos and no life would exist without the Sun furthermore neutrinos are also involved in beta minus Decay this Decay allows free neutrons to Decay into protons without this process the universe may have consisted of mostly neutrons so much fewer atoms may have been formed precluding formation of life so there's a lot of interest among physicists and astronomers for studying neutrinos because these seemingly useless ghosts appear to be pointing to new physics and this might allow us to have a breakthrough in our understanding of the way the universe really works and if you like this video give us a thumbs up and if you want to be informed for future videos from me be sure to subscribe I'll see you in the next video my friend foreign [Music] [Music] foreign

Channel: Arvin Ash

Views: 191,636

Keywords: neutrinos, neutrinos explained, what are neutrinos, neutrino, particle physics, quantum mechanics, neutrino oscillation, neutrino oscillation explained, neutrino mass, neutrino mass problem, neutrino detector japan, what is neutrino particle, why do neutrinos have mass, beta decay, how are neutrinos made, how are neutrinos detected, where do neutrinos come from, how are neutrinos produced in in the sun, why are neutrinos important, Neutrino flavors

Id: 2xW5QV9zwGs

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 15 2023