Defined by the North American physicist Frederick Reines as “the tiny amount of reality never imagined by a human being”, neutrinos are elementary particles with no electrical charge and a negligible mass that barely interact with matter. Right now, while you are reading these lines, billions of them are passing through you without a cell in your body flinching. Hence, they are popularly known as ” ghost particles” .
Hunting them is, therefore, one of the greatest scientific challenges that exist, and the gigantic IceCube observatory is dedicated to this, whose detector is buried 1.45 kilometers in the Antarctic ice. Specifically, IceCube captures a special type of neutrinos, astrophysical or cosmic , which, unlike those produced in the Sun or the Earth’s atmosphere, come from very violent phenomena in the universe.
The new discovery from the Antarctic laboratory has to do with a peculiar property of neutrinos called “taste .” Physicists already knew that these fundamental particles could acquire three “flavors” or states as they travel – there are tau, muon and electron neutrinos – and that these mix into what they have come to call “neutrino species”. The novelty is that, according to measurements made in IceCube, one of those mixtures is made of exactly equal parts of tau and muon neutrinos , an unexpected symmetry that can shed light not only on the nature of neutrinos, but on other keys to physics. subatomic beyond the standard model.
It is probably an indication of a hidden pattern in nature: scientists get excited about these kinds of symmetries. Furthermore, the IceCube results are consistent with those obtained by the T2K experiment in Japan, which studies lower-energy neutrinos.
If scientists finally manage to unravel all the mysteries of the neutrino, we could know, for example, what dark matter is made of, an invisible entity that fills 27% of the universe.
