Neutrinos are perhaps the most troublesome of all the known particles in physics. In the Standard Model of particle physics, the gold-standard explanation for how nature works at a fundamental level, neutrinos shouldn't have any mass at all. That's because of the particle's introverted attitude toward the rest of its quantum realm. Other particles, like electrons, get their masses through interaction with a quantum field created by the Higgs boson particle.
In order to oscillate between flavors, neutrinos need mass. And it turns out that, like flavors, there are three different neutrino masses. For the oscillation to work the three masses must be greater than zero, and all different. That way, the three masses travel at different speeds, and the flavors oscillate depending on the quantum state of the three masses. If the masses were all zero, neutrinos would travel at the speed of light and wouldn't have a chance to oscillate.
To date, physicists do not know the masses of the three neutrinos. They only have limits provided by various experiments on the total combined neutrino mass and some of the differences in masses between different ones.Nailing down the mass of any of the neutrino species would be a big help in particle physics, because we don't know how they have mass. There are lots of theoretical models out there, but we don't know which is correct. A known mass could help this effort.
In Germany, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology's KATRIN device is designed to do exactly that. The device features an absurdly large amount of tritium and a gigantic, 200-ton spectrometer, which measures the energy of electrons.
Hope oneday I can measure neutrinos that go through my body in thousands every minute, just to see what they do to me :)
😍😍
Ow One went right through me
I think neutrinos can't be measured in experiments without knowing how they get there. They have a strong electromagnetic field with more than one variable and different properties. One of my ideas is to measure their kinetic energy, which can vary from very high to very low.