Thursday, May 19, 2016

Still No Sterile Neutrinos

IceCube has not found any indication of the presence of sterile neutrinos after looking for it for 2 years, at least not in the energy range that it was expected.

In the latest research, the IceCube collaboration performed independent analysis on two sets of data from the observatory, looking for sterile neutrinos in the energy range between approximately 320 GeV and 20 TeV. If present, light sterile neutrinos with a mass of around 1 eV/C2 would cause a significant disappearance in the total number of muon neutrinos that are produced by cosmic-ray showers in the atmosphere above the northern hemisphere and then travel through the Earth to reach IceCube. The first set of data included more than 20,000 muon-neutrino events detected between 2011 and 2012, while the second covered almost 22,000 events observed between 2009 and 2010. 

I think there are other facilities that are looking for them as well. But this result certainly excludes a large portion of the "search area".

Zz.

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