Space-time induces neutrino oscillations

Space-time induces neutrino oscillations

Subject: Science & tech

Context : Professor Amitabha Lahiri of S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences (SNBNCBS) an autonomous institute under the DST, showed in a paper published along with Subhasish Chakrabarty, his student, that the geometry of space-time can cause neutrino oscillations through quantum effects even if neutrinos are massless.

Concept:

• Neutrinos are mysterious particles, produced copiously in nuclear reactions in the Sun, stars, and elsewhere.
• They also “oscillate”– meaning that different types of neutrinos change into one another – as has been found in many experiments.
• Probing of oscillations of neutrinos and their relations with mass are crucial in studying the origin of the universe.
• Neutrinos interact very weakly with everything else – trillions of them pass through every human being every second without anyone noticing; a neutrino’s spin always points in the opposite direction of its motion, and until a few years ago, neutrinos were believed to be massless.
• It is now generally believed that the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations require neutrinos to have tiny masses.

Neutrino

• Proton, neutron, and electron are tiny particles that make up atoms. The neutrino is also a tiny elementary particle, but it is not part of the atom. Such particles are also found to exist in nature.
• Neutrino has a very tiny mass and no charge. It interacts very weakly with other matter particles. So weakly that every second trillions of neutrinos fall on us and pass through our bodies unnoticed.
• Neutrinos come from the sun (solar neutrinos) and other stars, cosmic rays that come from beyond the solar system, and from the Big Bang from which our Universe originated. They can also be produced in the lab.