back to article Billion-tonne IceCube: Sterile neutrino does not exist

Physicists are almost certain that the sterile neutrino does not exist after failing to find any sign of the ghostly particle at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in the South Pole. Results published today in Physical Review Letters show that scientists have concluded sterile neutrinos do not exist with 99 per cent certainty. …

  1. asdf

    kudos

    Nice to see once again El Reg and other outlets reporting on a negative result. It is just as important (if not more) to the scientific method and it is important we reward scientists and teams for doing it. The modern journal system has really warped how science is done and its time we start fixing it for our own sake.

    1. spider from mars

      Re: kudos

      It's really been a year of negative results this year. First LUX's failure to find WIMPs, then the disappearance of the 750-GeV bump, and now this.

      1. asdf

        Re: kudos

        And yet we probably have a better idea of reality than at the start of the year. Still wins all around.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          The Search goes on: "Wir müssen wissen! Wird werden wissen!"

          There are experiments to detect Axions coming online. No Axion has ever been found, but the Search continues and maybe we will get lucky. (Though I remember reading that if Axions exist, the Sun would dump a good part of its energy into those and cool off far more quickly than observed.)

          The Axion field is said to be able to create naturally occurring gravity lasers (gasers?) in the presence of Black Holes. Sounds adventurous, but why the hell not.

          1. asdf

            Re: The Search goes on: "Wir müssen wissen! Wird werden wissen!"

            From what I understand if nothing else these negative studies often set a lower bound (which is also very important) even if they don't outright dismiss a phenomenon. Thinking of proton decay here which would be neat to see but it might well not be possible (looking that way).

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: The Search goes on: "Wir müssen wissen! Wird werden wissen!"

              Nice quote from Hilbert, thank you.

              Completely off topic -- not unusual for El Reg comments -- is a comment by Raoul Bott, who was once playing tiddly-winks on the floor at the IAS with von Neuman. The former asked the latter what it was like to be a genius. "Johnny" thought seriously about this, as he did about all things, and replied that he did not think he was a genius and only knew one real genius, David Hilbert.

              1. asdf
                Trollface

                Re: The Search goes on: "Wir müssen wissen! Wird werden wissen!"

                David Hilbert always makes me think of David St. Hubbins (Patron Saint of Quality Footwear).

  2. TRT Silver badge

    Photo credit...

    should go to Viper Imperial Probe Droid, registration number VPR345-Q-732-D, assignment Hoth recon.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: Photo credit...

      ... the drone was then shot down with a sterile neutrino blaster!

      Rest In Peace, Drone!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    but the strange bump began to crop up in other neutrino experiments

    Did they check if anyone was using a microwave oven?

    1. energystar
      Trollface

      ...Anyone was using a microwave oven?

      Antarctica is also kind of an Outback, popcorn is a basic staple down there.

    2. TeeCee Gold badge

      And did they subject their findings to the standard CERN validation test for seriously amazing shit (wiggle the wires a bit and then try again)?

    3. not.known@this.address

      microwave oven?

      What about a Thingamytron? Or an 'It-ain't-so-tron'.

      I'd start checking the staff and visitor logs for anyone called Marc DuQuesne too... It never hurts to be sure!

      1. Unicornpiss
        Thumb Up

        Re: microwave oven?

        Upvote for the DuQuesne reference. Good series.

  4. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Headmaster

    I raise you a fourth family...

    We're, um, Straight Outta 'fourth' 'trons... 'trinos... you know what we mean – scientists

    Yo, El Reg!

    I hope you realize that the "neutrino" has nothing to do with "threes" (the separation into electron/muon/tau families is something that goes sideways across all particle classes).

    It's "neutrino" for "the little neutron" in italian.

    I think it was Fermi who came up with that to explain mysterious missing momentum in subnuclear physics, apparently going to a particle that did not show up on any photographic plates...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I raise you a fourth family...

      "I think it was Fermi who came up with that to explain mysterious missing momentum in subnuclear physics, apparently going to a particle that did not show up on any photographic plates"

      It was actually Pauli, and the problem was boring old beta decay. Whereas alpha particles for a given disintegration all had more or less the same energy (with minor caveats), the electrons emitted in beta decay were all over the place. The electron energies and the nuclear recoil did not add up to a constant value and, even worse, were not in a straight line. Bohr even considered abandoning strict conservation of energy, which would have been exciting. Pauli posited that a neutral particle was being emitted and called it a neutron. Unfortunately Chadwick discovered the other, big neutron around the same time. Instead of fighting it out with particle accelerators at dawn, an Italian physicist named Amaldi suggested calling Pauli's neutron by a diminutive - neutrino - and Fermi adopted this, with Pauli agreeing. So Fermi was only very peripherally involved, like Storey who named the electron despite not being a major figure in electrical theory.

      What is interesting (to me at least) about neutrinos is that they are so common, carry so much energy as a whole, turn up in such an apparently bread and butter phenomenon, and yet are so hard to detect and so weird. They're an argument that dark matter or dark energy may be hiding in plain sight, we just don't know where to look or know what we're looking for.

    2. energystar
      Angel

      Re: I raise you a fourth family...

      ..."el neutrito", in Spanish.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So what's the latest explanation for the bumps in the data...

    ...if sterile neutrinos are looking unlikely?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So what's the latest explanation for the bumps in the data...

      Statistics.

    2. DropBear
      Trollface

      Re: So what's the latest explanation for the bumps in the data...

      That they were certainly around at the time the first experiment was done but with being sterile and all that they died out of natural causes by the time of the second...

  6. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

    Back of the envelope calculation = awesome

    A billion tonnes of ice is about a billion cubic meters which is about a cubic kilometre. And they have 5160 detectors, which is 193,000m³ per detector. If they're placed in a grid, that's about one every 58m.

    Can anyone tell me what sort of detector can spot a flash from a single subatomic particle collision through 29m of solid ice? Presumablhy a CCD of some sort, like on a digital camera - these react to photons. But the photon has to hit the CCD, and at one per 193,000m³ the odds seem a bit thin.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Back of the envelope calculation = awesome

      Photomultiplier tubes.

    2. richardcox13

      Re: Back of the envelope calculation = awesome

      > through 29m of solid ice?

      This is glacial ice: transparent.

      The ice we normally see is full of crystal flaws and is therefore optically translucent.

      Given a few thousand years of serious compression (under a km of ice) these flaws are force out and the ice becomes optically clear.

      1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

        Re: Back of the envelope calculation = awesome

        Much obliged. That lead me to this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2442v1.pdf which describes the setup. Very cool, at many levels.

  7. E 2

    The installation picture at the head of the story reminds me strongly of Deus Ex: Invisible War map located in the antarctic.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "sterile neutrinos do not exist with 99 per cent certainty"

    I'm picking nits here but the existence of a sterile neutrino is not a random process, they either or exist or they don't and there's no likelihood associated with that. It's just that we don't know.

    I believe what the scientists are saying is that if the neutrino exists then the experiment has a 99/100 chance of detecting it. Not detecting it therefore sort of suggest that maybe it doesn't exist and that's about as much as we can say about it. Further tests will either discover it or add to the subjective certainty that we may feel about the non-existence.

    (Obviously too lazy to actually go check the article so just guessing here. Plus I believe I have a patient in the operating room in need of general anaesthesia soon so shouldn't really be hanging around here anyway.)

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