Dark matter? Particle accelerators? Higgs boson? Particle physics has left the public fascinated, and perhaps puzzled, by its potential implications. Current work on an obscure particle called the neutrino may leave even physicists grasping for answers. Researchers at the Yale Wright Laboratory led by professor Karsten Heeger currently design and implement experiments to investigate if neutrinos are a new form of matter. Such a discovery would require a major revision of the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
According to the Standard Model of Particle Physics, neutrinos are neutral, massless elementary particles—matter that cannot be further subdivided. The neutrino can take three forms, the electron, tau, or muon neutrinos, and can only be acted upon by the universal weak force. The Standard Model attempts to explain the interactions in the subatomic world but cannot account for phenomena such as dark matter and dark energy.
The Wright Lab’s research on neutrinos is groundbreaking because it shows that the assumptions of the Standard Model are even more flawed than previously thought. In 2016, Heeger shared the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for three experiments showing that neutrinos can change their “flavor” as they travel through space. These changes in flavor—from electron to muon neutrinos, for example—are called neutrino oscillations and show that neutrinos have mass.
“If you weighed all neutrinos in the universe, their combined mass would equal that of the mass of all the visible stars in the sky,” Heeger explained.