[EMAIL PROTECTED] Wow! Search for extra dimensions // Privacy
Hi: The September Scientific American has a series of articles on privacy in today's technology. And this article: A New Neutrino Hunt; by Mark Alpert; 1 Page(s) Article description: The detection of extra dimensions beyond the familiar four-the three dimensions of space and one of time-would be among the most earth- shattering discoveries in the history of physics. Now scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., are designing a new experiment that would investigate tantalizing hints that extra dimensions may indeed exist. Last year researchers involved in Fermilab's MiniBooNE study, which detects elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos, announced that they had found a surprising anomaly. Neutrinos, which have no charge and very little mass, form out of nuclear reactions and particle decays. They come in three types, called flavors-electron, muon and tau-and oscillate wildly from one flavor to another as they travel along. While observing a beam of muon neutrinos generated by one of Fermilab's particle accelerators, the MiniBooNE researchers found that an unexpectedly high number of the particles in the low-energy range (below 475 million electron volts) had transformed into electron neutrinos. After a year of analysis, the investigators have failed to come up with a conventional explanation for this so-called low-energy excess. The mystery has focused attention on an intriguing and very unconventional hypothesis: a fourth kind of neutrino may be bouncing in and out of extra dimensions.
