3 ms·
Tau neutrinos, yes, but electron and muon neutrinos are significantly easier to identify - the problem with tau neutrinos is that when they interact, they produ
by misnome 5y ago
Tau neutrinos, yes, but electron and muon neutrinos are significantly easier to identify - the problem with tau neutrinos is that when they interact, they produce a tauon, which very, very quickly decays so it's hard to know if it was a tauon decaying to, say, a muon or electron - which look identical to their respective neutrino flavours, or one of those neutrinos to begin with.
This is not to say that it's _easy_ to detect the other kinds, you still need a large number of neutrinos and a large volume for detection. The example that always comes up is submarine communication - which has two problems - detecting a sparse and intermittent signal to get a useful bitrate out, and generating a beam of sufficient intensity to begin with, let alone a beam that is steerable!