The typical understanding of matter and antimatter is that they retain their “matter” or “antimatter” identity. As explained in an earlier article, if matter and antimatter particles are different, they are called Dirac particles if they are the same, they are called Majorana particles. The subject of one ongoing debate in the neutrino community is whether neutrinos and antineutrinos are distinctly different particles or the same particle. For this reason, the idea is called the seesaw mechanism. According to this idea, the masses of the familiar neutrinos and the new hypothetical heavy neutrino are tied together in such a way that if one gets very small, the other must get very large. One method to explain neutrinos’ small mass is to postulate that there is another form of neutrino that is extremely massive. This observation underscores the fact that we do not have a coherent picture of how some particles have huge masses while others have very tiny ones. The familiar electron, muon and tau neutrinos all have very low mass. Given that the neutrino sector is still pretty mysterious (for instance, establishing that neutrinos have mass occurred less than a decade and a half ago), there are many questions still to be answered. It is also possible to study neutrino physics using LHC data. This behavior would result in striking decay patterns that would show up in CMS data.įermilab has an enormous experimental program that studies neutrinos by shooting beams of them at detectors both near and far. Since for a Majorana neutrino the particle and antiparticle are the same, it is possible for an emitted matter neutrino to subsequently act like an antimatter neutrino.
The Dirac neutrino starts out as a matter particle and stays a matter particle throughout. It is equivalent in this analogy to something being both good and evil. CMS searched for a Majorana neutrino, a particle that is both a matter particle and an antimatter particle. Ordinary thinking is that matter and antimatter are diametrically different, like good and evil.
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