RE: Sterile neutrinos as a path to dark matter
very likely behind on a few replies already but im just gonna push it on the stack ...
though google keeps telling me in lots of places the standard model isnt actually proven , CERN itself seems to have a more nuanced opinion
.it is not time for physicists to call it a day just yet. Even though the Standard Model is currently the best description there is of the subatomic world, it does not explain the complete picture. The theory incorporates only three out of the four fundamental forces, omitting gravity. There are also important questions that it does not answer, such as “What is dark matter?”, or “What happened to the antimatter after the big bang?”, “Why are there three generations of quarks and leptons with such a different mass scale?” and more. Last but not least is a particle called the Higgs boson, an essential component of the Standard Model.
A lot of why but that's the reasons theorists exist ofcourse (and i suppose CERN has every reason to defend the model, lol)
Same thing for the neutrinos although i do remember that bit on indirect detection which i think you wrote and cherenkov radiation (which i think i got from a bbc horizon or something) so as stated here and [here](For study, neutrinos can be created artificially with nuclear reactors and particle accelerators.) where it says you can actually artificially create them in an accelerator ?
It also says they do interact with gravity but 'not with the strong force' o wait heh ... okay ....
o yea it says 'weak sub-atomic force' AND 'gravity there, they interact with both of them, i assumed until now weak force is a synonym for gravity , so it's not ?
(that's a nasty billboard steemstem has there btw, like HUGE)
This is all in theory (because it's theoretical physics) but the numbers work out so can i , for the time being, consider the sterile neutrino the missing link that will plug 95% of the gaping hole the universe is at the moment ?
(ill get back to the other replies too but its weeks at the moment, i wish i could say i had no time lol, i just have no brain lately and time seems to be having me, not the other way around)
Thanks for this nice interesting comment. I enjoyed answering it! :)
The Standard Model is not entirely proven at all. I agree with the quote from the CERN website.
The entire Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism that is responsible in particular for mass generation rely on a quantity that has not been measured so far, and that even after the end of the run of the Large Hadron Collider in a couple of decades will stay unmeasured. The interactions of the Higgs boson with the lighter particles are untested (and there is no way to test it for now). And so on.
Therefore, with this respect, the Standard Model is not complete. In addition, there is a bunch of conceptual limitations and issues that make us think that the Standard Model is not the end of the story (and this is why most of us impatiently wait to find what lies beyond it.
Yes, we can produce beams of neutrinos and detect them a few hundreds of kilometres away. This is one of the way to measure the appearance/disappearance effects I mentioned in the post. The production mechanism is quite "easy". The short version is as follows. We focus on a process in which we know neutrinos are produced, and manage to get rid of anything else from the beam once the process happended. One ends up with a beam of neutrinos :)
I admit this is slightly confusing. There is the weak force in the sense of the weak interactions. Active (i.e. non sterile) neutrinos feel it. Gravity is felt by every particle. However, the strength of gravity is even weaker than the strength of the weak force. Does tu clarify?
Unfortunately not. Sterile neutrinos fit the data well. But the fit without sterile neutrinos is not catastrophic, on the other hand, so that it is impossible to conclude at the time being.