Trying to measure the mass of neutrinos

2000/06/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Fisika

CERN laboratories in Geneva have approved a project to measure the mass of neutrinos. Since May 2005, the CERN particle accelerator will send a flow of neutrinos to the Montes Gran Sasso tunnel in Italy, where the physics laboratory is installed.

Neutrinos are elementary particles and hardly interact with matter. Of the millions and millions of neutrinos that will circulate every year between CERN and the Gran Forma 730 kilometers from the subsoil, the giant detector of the Italian laboratory will only catch two thousand five hundred. Physicists have considered that so far neutrinos have no mass, but in a trial conducted in Japan it has still been proven that when they expand they pass from one type of neutrino to another. That is only possible if we have mass.

The number of neutrinos that are transformed by distance in Gran Sasso or similar trials in Japan or the United States may be known. Although the mass is very small, neutrinos would have an important role in the Universe, since neutrinos are by no means the most abundant.