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RE: A final song for OPERA: 6 years of neutrino data, nice events and an exemplary open data policy
If I understand well, the detection of an muon neutrino oscillation to another flavor is done by measuring less Muon neutrinos than there would be at the start of the 'long' trip. (I mean statistically of course).
"muon neutrinos have been confirmed to primarily oscillate into tau neutrinos. This stemmed from the unambiguous observation of 10 muon-to-tau neutrino conversions."
Where does this come from? How do we know the oscillation is not towards the electronic flavor?
Hey @muphy! Glad to see you around! It has been a long time ^^
Exactly!
Opera is capable to reconstruct the interaction of a neutrino with the detector material. The identification process hence relies on the different final states arising from a tau, muon and electron neutrino interaction with the detector.
This is how the outgoing fluxes are measured.
Aaah, I understand, so the detector can identify the flavor of the neutrino it detects then. I didn't know this was possible, detector tech have progressed! I am saying this because I remember reading years ago, that the oscillation was originally discovered by some solar electron neutrino that were missing compared to widely accepted solar models, not because some muons neutrinos had been found.
Yes, it has been a very busy period, time for a little rest and Steemit fun :-) Glad to be back!
Depending on the flavor, neutrinos decay differently. For instance, a tau neutrino leads to the production of tau leptons that can be used as handles to reconstruct the initial flavor.
In fact, neutrino oscillations are studies in two distinct modes: the appearance mode (some neutrinos of a given flavor appear) and disappearance mode (some neutrinos of a given flavor disappear). Both are of course complementary and should give consistent results.
So specific tau-Neutrino detectors do exist then (if one considers the tau-lepton detector as part of the system). Thank @lemouth, you updated what I knew on the subject :-)
My pleasure, as always!