Are neutrinos their own antiparticle? | Even Bananas

Neutrinos are strange particles, but could they really be their own antimatter particle? And if they are their own antiparticle, what would that mean for our understanding of the universe? Join #evenbananas host Dr. Kirsty Duffy, along with guest Dr. Steven Biller, as they discuss research into neutrino-less double beta decays. #majorana #physics #neutrino

Links:
Why do bananas emit neutrinos episode:

Even Bananas playlist:

All Things Neutrino:

Fermilab physics 101:

Fermilab home page:

Production Credits:
Host: Kirsty Duffy
Director/Editor: Ryan Postel
Camera/Audio: Luke Pickering
Illustrator: Samantha Koch
Writers: Kirsty Duffy, Ryan Postel, Steve Biller, Caitlyn Buongiorno
Guest: Steve Biller
Theme Song: Scott Hershberger

[adamredwine]

I’m working on this for my PhD! Xe136 for the win!

[chae]

Best video I've found so far on the Majorana particle

[FrancisGalton]

Kudos to all of you at Fermilab for making these informative videos. Kudos also for making mention of the enigmatic and brilliant physicist Ettore Majorana (and for actually pronouncing his name correctly). He’s hardly ever mentioned here in the United States and I would gamble that less than 1% of Americans have ever heard of him.

Fun fact: Ettore Majorana was Sicilian, born and raised in the city of Catania. Portuguese physicist Joao Magueijo wrote a great book about him entitled “A Brilliant Darkness: The Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Ettore Majorana, the Troubled Genius of the Nuclear Age.”

[kajlennartsson]

Thank you Dr Kirsty Duffy and Dr Steven Biller for an interesting video. You two are amazing ⭐⭐✨✨🌹🌹

[SuperStingray]

Every time I hear about cutting edge physics experiments like neutrinos and dark matter, I have to reflect on how the ability to make new discoveries in fundamental physics now is beginning to be bottlenecked by pretty critical variables like the size of the planet Earth. To simply catch a neutrino, you need a sustained beam of energy that spans a continent and luck. It will be incredible if this species ever sees the day that neutrino physics play a crucial (intentional) role in engineering.

[eritronc]

Thanks for the video! I never hear about this or Majorana!!

[jonwesick]

Since neutrinos have mass, they only travel at less than the speed of light. This means you can find an inertial reference frame that overtakes a neutrino. From that reference frame, a left-handed neutrino would look like a right-handed antineutrino traveling in the opposite direction. In one reference frame you have a neutrino. In another an antineutrino. This paradox would be a good topic for a video.

[portobellomushroom]

I always assumed that in order to be its own anti particle it had to be chargeless, spin 0, and colorless. Neutrinos are chargeless and colorless (since they only interact via the weak force and gravity) but not spin 0.

[machawley]

Thanks for making the neutrino anti-neutrino conversation clear, organized, thoughtful and fun!

Since spin direction is variable over time, how can spin up and spin down be an annihilating combination?

[apostolakisl]

Is it possible that there was equal amounts of matter/antimatter and still are? Just that perhaps the universe is so huge (like 100 orders of magnitude bigger than what we see) that random distribution of particles resulted in whole section of matter and antimatter remaining separated spatially?

[alexkok]

What's that poster behind the professor, on the right?

[pedroricardomartinscasella]

By the way, I got a book that explains a bit about the story behind Majorana disappearance "Il caso Majorana", by Erasmo Recami. The book is in Italian and I am still learning the language, but it seems fun so far...

[douginorlando]

It’s not that two solutions exist; it’s that you need both solutions to exist at the same time in order to comply with basic assumptions Schrödinger used to derive his famous wave equation plus comply with Special relativity.

[GeoffryGifari]

If neutrino can change to its antimatter counterpart just like can the conversion happen while neutrinos (lets say from the sun) are still in mid-flight? Are they need to be surrounded by matter for the conversion to occur?

[isomeme]

I don't think there's any unanswered question about neutrinos more interesting than the overtaking problem.

Helicity is measured relative to the direction of travel. Since neutrinos have rest mass, they travel at less than the speed of light.

Suppose you see a neutrino go by at 0.9c. You observe that it has right helicity, meaning it's an antineutrino. You then jump in your spaceship and accelerate, chasing the particle. At some point your speed relative to your starting point exceeds 0.9c, which means in your frame the particle is now traveling in the opposite direction from what it was before. But its spin hasn't changed, which means its helicity has flipped to left. But that makes it a regular neutrino, not an antineutrino.

Did you just convert antimatter into matter simply by changing your frame of reference? If so, what does this imply for relativity? And how do you reconcile what you're seeing with observations by your colleague back home, who still sees an antineutrino?

[BiswajitBhattacharjee-upvv]

Dirac and Majorana are two roots of same equation. One has solved it for energy another for mass. As very nicely you tell the story of photon and neutrino are roots of same physics having matter and antimatter in same coin for neutrino where mass matters.
Good luck Majorana Fermilab put his technology to make a sense of mass beyond Higgs hat.
They need some precise value after 2012
Good wishes 2024 . Please get it 🙏.

[nirasen]

Whatever force converted the anti-matter into matter itself would still be a negative/counteracting force to preserve equilibrium, for if we started with nothing and nothing is what should always be, then all of the matter would be balanced with equal amounts of anti-matter, just not interacting with us (matter) - being prevented from interacting with matter by some other force that preserves this balance.

[DrDeuteron]

the strangest neutrino property is the oscillations, but that's only bc I don't think they are Majorana. If it turns out massive right handed counterparts are dark matter--then that will win.

[stephenzhao]

1:08 Steve Biller ... there just one problem it gavetwo solutions for energy. So this happenswith a quadratic equation. Dirac's equation was quadratic in energy so you could have a positive energy solution and a negative energy solution. Son in this sort of thing happens in physics, we tend to just throw away the nonphysical solution and keep going. But Dirac wondered whether the negative energy solution could have a physical interpretation, and that led him to postulate the existence of antiparticles. So nowadays we don't think antiparticles as having negative energy, but think those particles that have their fundamental properties reversed. And amazingly, a few years later, in 1932, the entiparticle to the electron was discovered, the positron which looks identically like an electron, but with a positive charge. 2:00 ... 4:09 There's a problem with the universe. When it was created, you must have had equal amounts of matter. 【Nature has no problem at all but physicists have big problems for their interpretions of cosmic microwave background origin and their ideology. There're three types of inflationary big bangs, first the type-I generates flat universe, the type-II made an ultimate chaos, then the type-III produces 90 C-QUANTA and 36 C-QUANTA evolves Dirac sea the neutral with 40% informational energy, the other 54 C-QUANTA (60%) is so-called Dark Energy. CMB is actually resulting from 1 C-QUANTA of the 54 C-QUANTA input to Dirac sea has caused manifestion of the first photons 】

[ullenes]

Was watching a lecture by neil turok, higgs chair of theoretical physics edinburgh uni who claimed that we have measured the relationship between the masses of the three variants and not their mass, with the 1st gen actually being zero mass. Anyone seen this proposal elsewhere?