Neutrinos continue run of odd behavior at Daya Bay

Enlarge / The interior of one of Daya Bay's detectors. (credit: Roy Kaltschmidt, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Late last week, the Daya Bay experiment in China released a new set of measurements of the neutrinos produced by the nuclear reactors on the site. The new data provides further examples of these strange particles refusing to act like we'd expect them to. This evidence further supports strange behavior that some have interpreted as evidence of the existence of particles beyond the Standard Model, but the new data doesn't bring evidence up to the level of significance required to announce discovery.

For good measure, there's also evidence of an entirely different anomaly—one that could be anything from an indication of new physics to a sign that our experiments were fundamentally misguided.

Any flavor you like

Last year's Physics Nobel Prize went to the people who discovered that neutrinos are less a single particle and more of an identity-shifting family of particles. Neutrinos come in three types, or flavors: electron, muon, and tau. But the identity of any given neutrino isn't fixed; instead, it can shift among these identities over time. Thus, even if you started with a population of pure electron neutrinos, you'd find a few muon neutrinos in the mix as well, given sufficient time.

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