Whilst engrossed in Powerpoint at the NNN17 Conference last month, I was struck by numerous references to Majorana, and came home on a mission to find out what it was.
Particles have all kinds of theoretical qualities, capabilities and even identities. Most of them have been theorised before they were proven to exist. The neutrino was one such particle, and its journey from the core of the Sun, or from the death of a neutron star, or even from a nuclear power plant, is the object of great scrutiny all around the world - from the giant cavern of SuperKamiokande to the underwater glass array of ORCA, neutrino-dedicated experiments spatter the planet with devices of ingenious complexity. In unfathomable quantities easily measuring billions, neutrinos stream through your body - and everything else - all the time.
Despite the impressive amount of supreme technology, little is known about the neutrino. Originally they were thought to have no mass at all, since they pass through matter, for the most part, unhindered and unseen. The beauty of these experiments lies in their dedication to neutrino detection, and in recent years the theory of No Mass was debunked, clouted soundly round the ear by the discovery of oscillation in 1998. For neutrinos change as they fly from one form into another, and in order to do this, they had to have mass, and that mass naturally had not only to be accounted for, it had to be measured. So it was.
While they are changing from one orientation to the next, neutrinos are said to 'disappear'.
Only, in the discovery of their mass, another conundrum surfaced. CP violation is a headache for physicists, it's an unknown quantity that mucks about with equations and creates more problems than Charge and Parity (the things that are violated) can solve. So in order to potentially quell the dichotomy of CP violation, a man called Ettore Majorana proposed the unthinkable - that the neutrino was, quite possibly, matter and antimatter at the same time. Like the oscillating neutrino, Ettore disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
Particles have all kinds of theoretical qualities, capabilities and even identities. Most of them have been theorised before they were proven to exist. The neutrino was one such particle, and its journey from the core of the Sun, or from the death of a neutron star, or even from a nuclear power plant, is the object of great scrutiny all around the world - from the giant cavern of SuperKamiokande to the underwater glass array of ORCA, neutrino-dedicated experiments spatter the planet with devices of ingenious complexity. In unfathomable quantities easily measuring billions, neutrinos stream through your body - and everything else - all the time.
Despite the impressive amount of supreme technology, little is known about the neutrino. Originally they were thought to have no mass at all, since they pass through matter, for the most part, unhindered and unseen. The beauty of these experiments lies in their dedication to neutrino detection, and in recent years the theory of No Mass was debunked, clouted soundly round the ear by the discovery of oscillation in 1998. For neutrinos change as they fly from one form into another, and in order to do this, they had to have mass, and that mass naturally had not only to be accounted for, it had to be measured. So it was.
While they are changing from one orientation to the next, neutrinos are said to 'disappear'.
Only, in the discovery of their mass, another conundrum surfaced. CP violation is a headache for physicists, it's an unknown quantity that mucks about with equations and creates more problems than Charge and Parity (the things that are violated) can solve. So in order to potentially quell the dichotomy of CP violation, a man called Ettore Majorana proposed the unthinkable - that the neutrino was, quite possibly, matter and antimatter at the same time. Like the oscillating neutrino, Ettore disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
The prospect of a particle being its own antiparticle doesn't just raise questions for physicists. It raises issues about the nature of the Universe itself, as an article from Stanford News in July of this year explains. There has long been a discontented murmur through the corridors of cosmology concerning where all the antimatter went after the Big Bang, when neutrinos were the dominant material in existence. While the birth of the four forces has since been theorised to most people's evident satisfaction, the mystery of where the antimatter went is one that hasn't lost its flavour. And to further elucidate an already complicated situation, a fifth force is under investigation, and Jonathan Feng (whose team is continuing work started in Hungary two years ago) says of it: “If true, it’s revolutionary. For decades, we’ve known of four fundamental forces...this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter.”
Without going into dark matters too deeply, we're clearly on the cusp of something big. And the GUT is telling us, if it's ever to be believed, that five forces plus a Majorana particle could open the door to new physics that wipes the Standard Model clean off the slate in terms of progressive critique.
Without going into dark matters too deeply, we're clearly on the cusp of something big. And the GUT is telling us, if it's ever to be believed, that five forces plus a Majorana particle could open the door to new physics that wipes the Standard Model clean off the slate in terms of progressive critique.
We, as ordinary non-scientific people interested in what all this means to us personally, are not exempt from the possible fallout of a Majorana neutrino. For while at the time of writing there are few experiments in existence dedicated to unravelling the possibilities of how neutrinos interact with quarks, they assuredly do interact with quarks one way or another. (On reading the article previously linked, you might be tempted to believe for a brief moment that this poetic muse might not be so far-fetched after all.) Like many on the outskirts of this fascinating science, I'm waiting with bated breath to see what kind of miracle Majorana mechanics might have in store, and how it might benefit us to know, one way or another, what the neutrino is saying to the building blocks of our own bodies on its flight from the stars.
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