Giant ice cube hints at the existence of cosmic antineutrinos

Distefano, Carla

doi:10.1038/d41586-021-00486-1

NEWS AND VIEWS
10 March 2021

Giant ice cube hints at the existence of cosmic antineutrinos

Evidence of a rare neutrino-interaction process called the Glashow resonance has been observed by a detector buried deep in the Antarctic ice — opening up a way to probe neutrino formation in astrophysical sources.

Carla Distefano ⁰

Carla Distefano
1. Carla Distefano is at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, 95123 Catania, Italy.
View author publications

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Access through your institution

Buy or subscribe

Neutrinos are the most elusive of the fundamental particles, and come in three types: the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino. Almost massless and lacking electric charge, they interact with matter only through a fundamental force known as the weak interaction, which is mediated by force-carrying particles called W and Z bosons. In 1959, the theoretical physicist Sheldon Glashow used the standard model of particle physics to predict¹ that negatively charged W bosons (W⁻ bosons) can be formed in the collisions between an electron and an electron antineutrino (the antimatter version of an electron neutrino). This process is now called the Glashow resonance, and occurs for electron antineutrinos that have energies of about 6.3 petaelectronvolts (1 PeV is 10¹⁵ eV).

Access options

Access through your institution

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Nature 591, 206-207 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00486-1

References

Glashow, S. L. Phys. Rev. 118, 316–317 (1960).
Article Google Scholar
Vitagliano, E., Tamborra, I. & Raffelt, G. Rev. Mod. Phys. 92, 045006 (2020).
Article Google Scholar
The IceCube Collaboration. Nature 591, 220–224 (2021).
Article Google Scholar
Groom, D. E., Mokhov, N. V. & Striganov, S. I. Atomic Data Nucl. Data Tables 78, 183–356 (2001).
Article Google Scholar
Aartsen, M. G. et al. J. Instrum. 9, P03009 (2014).
Article Google Scholar
Barger, V. et al. Phys. Rev. D 90, 121301 (2014).
Article Google Scholar
The IceCube-Gen2 Collaboration. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.04323 (2020).