Though this information is not directly related to Quantum technology, we think you’ll be delightfully pleased to read it…
About a thousand trillion of these ghostly Neutrinos particles pass through our body every second but yet we don’t even know their weight! The neutrino is the only known particle whose mass remains a mystery.
Physicists found that neutrinos could oscillate between three “flavor” states: electron, muon and tau. These oscillations can only happen if neutrinos also have three possible mass states, where each flavor has distinct probabilities of being in each of the three mass states. The mass states travel through space differently, so by the time a neutrino goes from point A to point B, this mix of probabilities will have changed, and a detector could measure a different flavor. If there are three different mass states, then they can’t all be zero. Therefore neutrinos have mass.
In September, after 18 years of planning, building and calibrating, the KATRIN (Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino) experiment in Germany is closing in on the mass of the neutrino, which could point to new laws of particle physics and reshape theories of cosmology. It found that the neutrino can’t weigh more than 1.1 electron-volts (eV). (Quantamagazine)
