As Hunt for Sterile Neutrino Continues, Mystery Deepens

“So the plot thickens,” says Karol Lang, a professor of physics at The University of Texas at Austin and co-spokesperson for the MINOS experiment. “But it’s still possible that new experiments being developed at Fermilab might reveal some exciting new physics to explain these very different results.”

The results are being published this week as three separate letters in the journal Physical Review Letters (see links below).

A team of researchers from UT Austin played many roles in producing the MINOS results, including graduate students Dung Phan, Simon De Rijck and Tom Carroll, and postdoctoral fellows Adam Schreckenberger, Will Flanagan and Paul Sail.

“It is very exciting to work on one of the pioneering experiments and have such a big impact on the field,” says De Rijck.

Neither the MINOS nor Daya Bay results alone could be directly compared to the Los Alamos measurements, but combined, they could.

“It’s not common for two major neutrino experiments to work together this closely,” says Adam Aurisano of the University of Cincinnati, one of the MINOS scientists.

A resolution to the mystery of sterile neutrinos might come soon. Researchers in Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Neutrino Program have already begun collecting data specifically targeting particles in the narrow mass range where sterile neutrinos might yet be hiding. Meanwhile, Lang and his colleagues in MINOS and Daya Bay have more data that they plan to analyze in the coming year, which might narrow the possible range of physical properties even further.

“A sterile neutrino, if found, would be a game changer for particle physics,” says Phan.