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RE: Sterile neutrinos as a path to dark matter
The thing about learning and plugging away is that little pieces start fitting together. When I read "neutrino" in your blog, I thought 'Fermi'. I remembered reading some time ago about radioactive decay. Neutrinos were in some way involved. Now I know how !! Aha.
And that neat law: energy-momentum conservation--put that together with the principle of symmetry. The order of the physical universe becomes more comprehensible.
The fourth neutrino, oscillating gently, invisibly--possibly holding the keys to (no, possibly being) dark matter. It's really quite beautiful and exciting.
Thank you!
Thanks a lot for passing by and leaving this nice comment!
That is fully correct. Pauli and Fermi indeed initiated what has paved the way to our understanding of the weak force. For more information, I refer to this post I wrote more than 3 years ago.
Funnily enough, energy conservation is a symmetry: the laws of physics are invariant under translations. :)
A fourth neutrino cannot help as it would be too light for being dark matter. But we can add as many sterile neutrinos as desired without impacting the visible part of the theory. With at least two sterile neutrinos, dark matter is there.
There are however other options for dark matter, and one must keep in mind that neutrino anomalies are called anomalies because some experiments disagree with others. This is why ICARUS is important to double check independently those things.
I'm so pleased the two concepts came together in my head. I think a rough sort of understanding is developing...thank you for the 'lessons' :)
I don't see that as 'lessons', really ;)
No, not lessons. But I learn...very relaxed and congenial, but still, learning. For me, every day, that makes life more interesting.
:)