The first direct wave package measurement revealed a surprising discovery: neutrinos are greater than typical atomic nuclei.
The first direct measurement of neutrino size – a subatomic particle without electric charge – suggests that they are at least larger than an atomic corebut it can be even more times.
These particles are everywhere: in our body, for example, there are hundreds of thousands of millions. It is important, therefore, to realize its size, so that it is possible to build a neutrin that allows you to understand your oscillations.
If the neutrino is a certain measureit will be possible to understand these oscillations, important for one day we can realize why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.
The problem is that, instead of being spherical, quantum mechanics explains that particles are diffuse waves, moving and vibrating as they travel through space.
Since neutrinos rarely interact with normal matter, so far it had only been possible to enable an interval of 13 orders of magnitude, explains.
But now, Joseph Smolskyresearcher at Colorado School of Mines, and colleagues made the First Direct Measurement of the Wave Packagemeasuring radioactive beryllium as it declared in lithium – the process called “electron capture”.
The new, published in Naturerevealed that neutrinos should be at least hundreds of times larger than the previous estimate, which makes them larger than typical atomic nuclei: they have at least 6.2 picometer.
“When I think of an electron capture process, I imagine it inside the nucleus, because the electron has to overlap with a nucleus. But the limit we showed says that the size of neutrino is actually much larger than the core itself when it comes out, ”explains Smolsky.
“Technically, this is a very difficult measure,” he says Alfons Weber from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany. “They used a very elegant method to perform a precision measurementsomething I thought could never do. ”
