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Nuclear reaction rules out sterile-neutrino hypothesis

An anomalous measurement from a nuclear reactor triggered a three-year campaign to find an elusive particle called the sterile neutrino. The search shows definitively that sterile neutrinos don’t exist — but the anomaly persists.
  1. Jun Cao

    1. Jun Cao is at the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.

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Neutrinos are among the most abundant elementary particles in the Universe, but they have zero electric charge and interact only weakly with matter, so are difficult to detect in experiments. They have therefore been implicated as the reason behind some of the key gaps in our current understanding of the Universe. The long-held idea1 that there are only three types of neutrino was challenged in 19962 by evidence suggesting the possibility of a fourth type, called the sterile neutrino. Further support for this proposal came in 20113, when the total number (the flux) of antineutrinos — the antimatter counterpart of neutrinos — produced in a nuclear reactor differed significantly from that predicted. A dedicated search ensued. And now, in a paper in Nature, the STEREO collaboration4 confirms the flux anomaly, but reports that this discrepancy cannot be explained by the existence of a sterile neutrino.

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Nature 613, 248-249 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04581-9

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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