"Scientists announced on Wednesday that they have found no evidence for the hypothetical sterile neutrino, an extra version of the ghostly neutrino particles that are ubiquitous in the universe. The finding comes from the U.S. Department of Energyrun Fermilab's MicroBooNE experiment. Sterile neutrinos are a popular theoretical prediction because they could help explain the cosmos' mysterious dark matter, if they exist."
"Neutrinos come in three known flavorselectron, muon and tauand can oscillate, or flip, between them. In the 1990s physicists observed these elusive particles oscillating in a way that seemed inconsistent with established theory. To explain the weird observations, physicists proposed that what they were observing was in fact a new, fourth kind of neutrinothe sterile neutrino. But although the new results essentially rule that possibility out, they pose new, exciting questions."
MicroBooNE found no evidence for a hypothetical sterile neutrino, an extra neutrino type once proposed to explain past oscillation anomalies and potentially contribute to dark matter. The null result undermines the straightforward extension of the Standard Model by adding a fourth neutrino as an explanation for those anomalies. The outcome narrows possible theoretical explanations and raises questions about what produced the earlier anomalous signals. The result originates from Fermilab data and was published in Nature, prompting renewed scrutiny of past experiments and the search for alternative explanations or new physics beyond current models.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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