Each specific neutrino only interacts with its particular type of electron-like particle: the electron, and the electron neutrino, the muon and the muon neutrino, and the tau particle and the tau neutrino. Each of these has an electrical charge of -1 and responds to the weak nuclear force, but not the strong nuclear force. Now there are three different “flavors” of neutrino, each associated with one of the three electron-like particles that had been discovered by that time: In order of increasing mass, these are the electron, the muon, and the tau particle. The problem was that the number of neutrinos observed to be emitted by the Sun was much smaller than the number predicted by theory, too small by a factor of three, and theorists were scrambling to try to figure out why this was. Even light generated in the core takes many years to get out due to its scattering within the Sun. As such, they are a convenient and immediate probe into what’s going on at the Sun’s core, because they emerge promptly, unlike any other sort of signal. Approximately 100 trillion neutrinos pass through you every second, but you’d never know it because nothing happens as they pass. So if the the neutrino created by the process had a spin of ½, but was oriented in the opposite direction of the other two particles, you get ½ + ½ - ½ = ½, and angular momentum is again conserved.īecause neutrinos respond only to the weak nuclear force, they pass through most matter as though it wasn’t there. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed the existence of the neutrino specifically as a particle that would make up the difference. The process as described starts with a single particle with spin ½, and then ends with two particles with spin ½ + ½ = 1, which violates angular momentum conservation. All three of these particles carry a spin angular momentum of ½. For example, a neutron, left to its own devices, decays into a proton and an electron. They were originally invoked to fix an apparent violation of the conservation of angular momentum in these nuclear decay processes. As massless particles, they would travel at the speed of light. Neutrinos were originally conceived as massless and electrically neutral particles that are produced in the process of nuclear decay brought about by the weak nuclear force. At the time, there was a problem regarding solar neutrinos, that is neutrinos emitted by the Sun as products of nuclear processes taking place at its core.
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