Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: Pecos_Bill on 03/04/2013 21:06:07
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Do we know whether neutrinos exhibit quantum phenomena?
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I believe yes. They fluctuate between flavours and masses as the eigenstates for the masses are not same as the eigenstates for the three flavours ( electron mu and tau). This sounds pretty quantum to me.
Remember that we can demonstrate quantum properties - double slit experiment etc for pretty massive manufactured particles; I am thinking of buckyballs which are 60 carbon atoms. Buckyballs will interfere and cause patterns when fired through a correct sized pair of slits. We could never do this with neutrinos of course and they would go straight through the block or the slit without noticing the difference. everything is a quantum entity - but in large slow moving massive objects the other forces, and sheer probabilty stop us noticing the quantum effects. We only notice these counterintuitive effects when we have removed all extraneous noise and can concentrate on the fine details
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Energy radiated from a hot gas is quantised in photons with a particular spectrum of energies which depends on the temperature of the gas.
Energy radiated from a nuclear reaction is quantised in neutrinos with a particular spectrum of energies which depends on the particular nuclear reaction.
Different types of neutrino detectors are used to detect neutrinos in different energy bands (but almost all neutrinos pass straight through the detector without being detected).
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Do we know whether neutrinos exhibit quantum phenomena?
A neutrino is a particle emitted during beta decay such as when a neutron decays into an electron, a proton and neutrino. Since the neutrino is postulated to be particle rather than continuous matter and experiments are consistent with the existance of neutrinos then in that sense neutrinos are quantized since to be quantized means to exist in discrete entities, i.e. lumps of matter.