LATimes, BBC, New Scientist etc: Japanese spy on neutrinos in the changing room
It’s been several years since scientists discovered that the so-called “missing neutrinos” from the Sun’s core had merely changed their identities on the way to Earth. Such “neutrino oscillations” are now part of standard textbook physics. But they are back in the news. This time a new kind of transformation has physicists buzzing. It happened in Japan. There a machine called the J-PARC in the city of Tokai shot a beam of neutrinos through the intervening swell of Earth’s crust and straight at the Super-Kamiokande detector in Kamioka, 295 km way. In a twinkling some of the starting 
batch of muon neutrinos showed up at the detector as electron neutrinos, an identity-shift for neutrinos of a sort new to science. It may provide a way to see if and how matter and anti-matter are not perfectly symmetrical opposites. The next step, after repair of earthquake damage, will be to try the same test with anti-matter neutrinos. Maybe there’ll be a charge-parity symmetry violation. Maybe science will glimpse the reason why matter dominates the universe and why antimatter is an ephemeral curiosity. Maybe.
Well, that all sounds pretty incremental. Fascinating and technically impressive as these results may be it’s not as though the secret foundations of the universe are laid bare. Most news outlets that covered this handle the news as a possible gateway to interesting and more fundamental revelations, but do not hyperventilate. A few – one at least – go a tiny bit, Holy Grail-invoking, um, berserk.
Oddly, this news appears simply to have been announced in Japan by members of the international scientific team – not at a conference or in a journal. A paper is in submission at Physical Review Letters (see Grist below) with the usual endless list of of particle physics authors. Ordinarily one would not expect such a splash. But many researchers got their home institutes around the world to issue press releases. That may be why it got as much ink as it would have were it in Science or Nature. Or done with NASA money.
Stories:
- New Scientist – David Shiga: Neutrinos caught ‘shape shifting’ in a new way; A straightforward and unembroidered account.
- Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Neutrino observation a step toward undersanding the Big Bang ; The hed’s overly big bang-centric. Maugh’s text makes clear that only one aspect is in direct play, the matter-antimatter divide.
- BBC – Jonathan Amos: Neutrino particle ‘flips to all flavours ;
- Popular Science – Clay Dillow: Japanese Neutrino Finding Could Explain Why There Is Matter in the Universe/ A new kind of oscillation could be the key to life, the univese, and everything ; Oh, c’mon. That qualifying word “could” is a mighty hedge.
- Daily Mail (UK) Daniel Bates: Are we on the verge of the science-fiction Holy Grail? Reseachers ‘one step closer’ to finding out why matter dominates the universe ; Holy moly, and thank you Jim Handman for flagging this wretchedly excessive headline for us complete with that most common thing in news (just put holy grail in a search engine’s news mode and stand back) . Bates’s story, for all that and for all this tabloid newspaper’s celebrity obsession as shown by the accompanying story blurbs, undergoes a little personality shifting itself as it goes on and comes back down to Earth.
- Mainichi Daily News : Research team detects changes in elementary ‘neutrino’ particles in world first ;
- ScienceNOW – Adrian Cho: First Results From Japanese Neutrino Experiment Hint at Big Things to Come: Makes clear that this test says nothing about antimatter. But the effect is big, so should be easy to see it again in an antimaterial sort of way.
Grist for the Mill:
Article preprint ;
J-PARC Press Release ; Duke University Press Release ; U. British Columbia Press Release ; U. Colorado Press Release ; U. Rochester Press Release ; University of Warwick Press Release ;Sci. Tech. Facilities Council (UK) Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
June 17th, 2011 at 11:32 am
Charlie, do you have Nature’s news blog in your RSS feeds? Our summary at http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/06/neutrino_oscillations_could_pr.html was brief but posted ahead of other stories I saw in English language media.
Regarding how reporters may have learned about this; for my part someone contacted me under embargo. One reason Science and Nature papers get attention is because of the journals’ embargo system, and it makes sense for scientists to contact reporters about their results in advance under embargo even when their chosen journal doesn’t require it.
Regarding whether the result is “incremental,” this was the strongest detection yet of neutrinos produced by oscillations from another flavor, as opposed to the strong but circumstantial evidence of a flavor “going missing.” Thus the story is not that there is a “new kind of transformation” but rather that there is a new kind of evidence for it. (Although as Adrian reports the Opera experiment at Gran Sasso claimed to catch a hint of a tau neutrino produced in a muon neutrino beam in 2010, that was tentative.)
An alternative question to ask could be how much attention is warranted for a result at the statistical level of 2.5 sigma (less than the 3 sigma that is the standard in this field to claim evidence let alone a discovery). On the other hand there is the novelty of the type of measurement combined with its physics plausibility. Plus, it is a point of news relevance (that also explains why the group did not collect more data before announcing such a modest signal) that the accelerator was shutdown by the Japan earthquake on March 11.
June 17th, 2011 at 11:48 am
Thanks Eugenie – especially for your news blog. I didn’t notice anybody else calling out the significance shortfall – although 2.5 sigma is still enough to get people talking. By ‘incremental’ I meant only that, broadly, neutrino oscillations are already part of the canon, and a new oscillation (including a new way of directly seeing it) is a discovery more or less isolated in significance to our understanding of neutrinos. If I understand all this, the anti-matter version of the experiment could be the one that reverberates broadly through physics, if it shows how matter and anti-matter work differently and explains the big paradox of a matter-dominated universe.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the journal accepts the paper, 2.5 sigma and all.