6 ms·

Not a professional physicist but… Given the absurdly low rate of detection, it feels like a focused experiment designed explicitly to maximise detection is war

Not a professional physicist but… Given the absurdly low rate of detection, it feels like a focused experiment designed explicitly to maximise detection is warranted. Difficulty of neutrino experiments aside, this is physics! If we want more detection events we just need to make more particles and/or build a bigger detection apparatus. I don’t necessarily think there’s much benefit to a “larger volume” detector in this particular experiment (MiniBooNE) due to beam width and spreading rate, but I don’t see how having one or two more identical detectors lined up along the generated neutrino‘s path wouldn’t help. Building a more “powerful” neutrino production system, even as simply as just having an accelerator with a higher particle flux would likely increase this factor. If people are arguing over possible issues in the experiment design (which there do appear to be concerns here, but grain of salt as IANAP) then dialling the experiment parameters up will should make any experiment specific effects more obvious as there will now be two sets of data points that can be correlated by the experiment parameters to fill out such effects.

ncmncm 5y ago
Once again(!!), the problem is not detection. It took 15 years to get what we got, but we got enough. (Why is this so hard to grasp, even with it explained over, and over, and over?) The problem is that what we did get demonstrates conclusively that there are new physics to elucidate. There are various possibilities for how those will turn out, with different results to be determined, and to design experiments to check on. Right now it doesn't look like anybody knows how to design those experiments, or what even to look for. And, weirdly, there have been no headlines about this, and apparently no papers published proposing details of the new physics and their implications for what we might attempt to measure, or expect to find if we succeeded in measuring.
- techdragon 5y ago
  I’m aware it’s not an issue of detection. I was more speaking to the ancillary issues surrounding the result. The last thing we need is to wait 15 more years while people argue over experiment design validity before anything gets done to even begin investigation into the new physics that may be hidden here. Any new higher flux neutrino (or anti neutrino) source will be just as useful for subsequent studies into this phenomena. The nice thing about neutrinos in this case is they go through basically everything. So nothing stops a new particle source being constructed specifically for multiple such experiments. Unless for some reason distances from source to detector are such a sensitive value in the potential experiment setups that every subsequent experiment needs to be exactly 20 or 30 meters from the particle source, barring that we could easily setup a line of different experiments a hundred meters long or more! If subsequent experiments hope to produce results with sufficient statistical detail to elucidate the new physics this points towards they are likely to be significantly aided by a higher flux source. Science is a team sport and the sport of neutrino flux anomaly research currently has measures its innings/quarters/sets in decades. It may take two or even more rounds of subsequent experiments to fully uncover what’s going on here… not because we’re waiting for the next great mind… but because our puny particle accelerators aren’t making enough neutrinos for us to study this phenomenon faster than the pitch drop experiment!
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    I get you: It would take another 20+ years to test any new hypothesis. So, publishing yours, even if you think you're right, doesn't feel too urgent, and wouldn't advance your career anytime soon. The Nobel would come at best 40 years later, and then only if you were right and they were generous. So to fire anybody up, we need to be able to test hypotheses in a lot less than 20 years.

ncmncm 5y ago

Once again(!!), the problem is not detection. It took 15 years to get what we got, but we got enough. (Why is this so hard to grasp, even with it explained over, and over, and over?) The problem is that what we did get demonstrates conclusively that there are new physics to elucidate. There are various possibilities for how those will turn out, with different results to be determined, and to design experiments to check on. Right now it doesn't look like anybody knows how to design those experiments, or what even to look for. And, weirdly, there have been no headlines about this, and apparently no papers published proposing details of the new physics and their implications for what we might attempt to measure, or expect to find if we succeeded in measuring.

techdragon 5y ago
I’m aware it’s not an issue of detection. I was more speaking to the ancillary issues surrounding the result. The last thing we need is to wait 15 more years while people argue over experiment design validity before anything gets done to even begin investigation into the new physics that may be hidden here. Any new higher flux neutrino (or anti neutrino) source will be just as useful for subsequent studies into this phenomena. The nice thing about neutrinos in this case is they go through basically everything. So nothing stops a new particle source being constructed specifically for multiple such experiments. Unless for some reason distances from source to detector are such a sensitive value in the potential experiment setups that every subsequent experiment needs to be exactly 20 or 30 meters from the particle source, barring that we could easily setup a line of different experiments a hundred meters long or more! If subsequent experiments hope to produce results with sufficient statistical detail to elucidate the new physics this points towards they are likely to be significantly aided by a higher flux source. Science is a team sport and the sport of neutrino flux anomaly research currently has measures its innings/quarters/sets in decades. It may take two or even more rounds of subsequent experiments to fully uncover what’s going on here… not because we’re waiting for the next great mind… but because our puny particle accelerators aren’t making enough neutrinos for us to study this phenomenon faster than the pitch drop experiment!
- ncmncm 5y ago
  I get you: It would take another 20+ years to test any new hypothesis. So, publishing yours, even if you think you're right, doesn't feel too urgent, and wouldn't advance your career anytime soon. The Nobel would come at best 40 years later, and then only if you were right and they were generous. So to fire anybody up, we need to be able to test hypotheses in a lot less than 20 years.