NEUTRINO BALANCE...

The Big Bang produced equal quantities of matter and antimatter, which should have neutralised one another, but still the universe formed. A five year search for a very rare kind of nuclear decay, could reveal how it happened...

Science says the universe should not exist. Or rather, we don’t understand why matter exists. This experiment hopes to explain it.

First, there was nothing, and then everything formed: dimensions, time, laws of nature, and the matter which later turned into stars, planets, and life. That is the Genesis of the universe, according to the most widely accepted theory, the Big Bang theory. However, several conditions concerning the birth of the universe remain veiled in mystery.

One of the major unanswered questions is why matter exists. According to physicists’ models, the Big Bang was symmetrical, i.e. it produced equal quantities of matter and antimatter. When matter and anti-matter encounter, they destroy each other and are converted into radiation. So, the Big Bang ought to have ended up with the new universe being full of radiation. But as we know, that was not what happened. Instead, the universe was full of tiny components, which are needed to build the particles that we know today.

A team of physicists might soon find out why. Under the Gran Sasso mountain in the Apennine Mountains of central Italy, they have built the Cuore detector which is to study the only particle that might still include the secret of why the Big Bang did not end up as a failure: the neutrino.

Particle was a stop-gap solution

The existence of the neutrino was first predicted in 1930 by physicist Wolfgang Pauli. He invented the tiny particle in desperation over not being able to figure out the calculation of the energy involved in beta decay. He knew that when a radioactive material passes through beta decay, a neutron in the atomic nucleus is converted into a proton, which remains in the nucleus, and an electron that is emitted. But Wolfgang Pauli’s experiments showed that the emitted electron included less energy than the mass difference between the neutron and proton. So, he introduced a new particle that could carry the missing energy: the neutrino.

However, Wolfgang Pauli, could not prove his new theory. Not until 1956 did two American physicists, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, manage to prove the existence of neutrinos. The scientists carried out their experiments close to a nuclear reactor, which they knew ought to emit overwhelming quantities of the tiny particles. There, they were looking for two gamma rays, which are