Detector Finally Catches Neutrinos In Act of Flavor Changing
Over the weekend, a detector in the Gran Sasso facility in Italy detected a single tau neutrino in a beam that should have been purely muon neutrinos. That may not sound like a stunning turn of events, but it’s actually yet another demonstration that the Standard Model of physics, which explains the behavior of elementary particles, doesn’t quite explain everything. It’s also the product of decades of somewhat confusing physics along with an experimental setup that involves shooting a beam of particles through hundreds of kilometers of the Earth’s crust, only to have most of them go undetected. Welcome to the very strange world of the neutrino.