Viewpoint: The Plot Thickens for a Fourth Neutrino

[Patrick]

For @dga471 and @PdotdQ and physics lovers:

Viewpoint: The Plot Thickens for a Fourth Neutrino

[PdotdQ]

This is a huge claim - perhaps deserving a Nobel prize. I would need to wait for further discussions by people who are experts in this field to see if I should believe this result.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

You and @dga471 are at Harvard. Give us a bead on the buzz there about this.

[dga471 (Daniel)]

I talked about this to one of my friends here who works in a group specializing in neutrino experiments, and according to him, most neutrino scientists are still skeptical of this result, since the LSND and MiniBoone detectors both use the same method of detection (mineral oil), and it is possible that a common systematic error affected them. The question is if other neutrino experiments such as MicroBoone (which uses liquid argon and has a completely different detector design) will corroborate it, and I’m told that they will take a few years to gather enough data to do that. What this results shows is that the LSND observation was very likely not a statistical fluke.

[Patrick]

@dga471

I talked about this to one of my friends here who works in a group specializing in neutrino experiments, and according to him, most neutrino scientists are still skeptical of this result, since the LSND and MiniBoone detectors both use the same method of detection (mineral oil), and it is possible that a common systematic error affected them. The question is if other neutrino experiments such as MicroBoone (which uses liquid argon and has a completely different detector design) will corroborate it, and I’m told that they will take a few years to gather enough data to do that. What this results shows is that the LSND observation was very likely not a statistical fluke.

Ah, they have no faith. We want sterile neutrinos, we need sterile neutrinos, can’t we just believe in them really hard and make them true?