Sunday, February 15, 2009

Neutrinos: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Recently I went to Physical Research Laboratory Ahmedabad, India to attend a colloquium titled "Neutrinos: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" by Sandip Pakvasa, University of Hawaii. The talk was really interesting. He presented almost everything within that one hour talk. The best thing was he talked about both experiments as well as theories regarding neutrinos. I was totally pissed off with the neutrino physics when my friend Sushant (working in neutrino physics) used to tell me the kinds of stuffs he was doing. Almost eighty percent of his work was some coding only without any touch of physics. According to him the people who work in neutrino oscillations phenomenology keep playing with the parameters involved and try to fit the models with observed data from neutrino experiments like SuperkamiokaNDE, kamLAND etc. But after Pakvasa's talk suddenly the neutrinos have become interesting to me again.
Sandip was talking about some constraints on neutrino magnetic moments. I have got confused at some point. What I want to know is can we measure neutrino magnetic moment? And if neutrino is a Majorana fermion how can it have magnetic moment? If we can measure neutrino magnetic moment can we safely rule out the possibility of neutrino being a majorana fermion? If neutrino is not a Majorana fermion it can not be its own anti-particle which means neutrinoless double beta decay experiments are not going to give any positive results. I do not know how profound these questions are but I would need to do some careful study to clear these doubts.
I was surprised when I was going through one of Bilenky's paper on neutrino where he talked about neutrino oscillations. He said that neutrino oscillations can not say anything about the neutrino nature that is, whether its a Dirac or Majorana fermion. It is because of the fact that the expression for probability of oscillation is same for Dirac as well as Majorana fermions. So oscillation data can not say anythng about the nature of neutrino. It can only give the mass squared differences of the neutrinos.
I welcome your comments regarding my confusions or anythng you like.

1 comment:

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