Physicists have taken one small-but-consequential step toward measuring the mass of an elusive"ghost particle" called a neutrino — an achievement that could poke a significant hole in the Standard Model of particle physics.
"With an Airbus A-380 with a maximum load, you could use this sensitivity to determine whether a single drop of water has landed on it," Christoph Schweiger, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany and the study's first author, said in a statement. Related: Ghostly neutrino particles are blasting out of a nearby galaxy, and scientists aren't sure why
Such a transformation should be possible only if neutrinos have some mass, leading physicists to design complex experiments to gauge it. To find this intrinsic mass, physicists look for something called the Q value — the difference between the sum of the masses of the initial reactants and the sum of the masses of the final products. With this value in hand, further measurements can extract the intrinsic mass from the overall mass of the atom.
This measurement can also be made in reverse by observing an electron being captured by the artificial isotope holmium-163, transforming it into dysprosium-163 and releasing a neutrino. But to do so, the isotope must be surrounded by gold atoms.—Weird neutrino behavior could explain long-standing antimatter mystery"However, these gold atoms could have an influence on holmium-163," Schweiger said.