Quantum weirdness: neutrinos change flavors (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, July 23, 2016, 15:26 (3046 days ago) @ David Turell

Broadcast and then analyzed hundreds of miles away:-http://phys.org/news/2016-07-weird-quantum-effects-hundreds-miles.html-Now, MIT physicists have found that subatomic particles called neutrinos can be in superposition, without individual identities, when traveling hundreds of miles.-***-"The team analyzed data on the oscillations of neutrinos—subatomic particles that interact extremely weakly with matter, passing through our bodies by the billions per second without any effect. Neutrinos can oscillate, or change between several distinct "flavors," as they travel through the universe at close to the speed of light.-"The researchers obtained data from Fermilab's Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search, or MINOS, an experiment in which neutrinos are produced from the scattering of other accelerated, high-energy particles in a facility near Chicago and beamed to a detector in Soudan, Minnesota, 735 kilometers (456 miles) away. Although the neutrinos leave Illinois as one flavor, they may oscillate along their journey, arriving in Minnesota as a completely different flavor.-"The MIT team studied the distribution of neutrino flavors generated in Illinois, versus those detected in Minnesota, and found that these distributions can be explained most readily by quantum phenomena: As neutrinos sped between the reactor and detector, they were statistically most likely to be in a state of superposition, with no definite flavor or identity.-"What's more, the researchers found that the data was "in high tension" with more classical descriptions of how matter should behave. In particular, it was statistically unlikely that the data could be explained by any model of the sort that Einstein sought, in which objects would always embody definite properties rather than exist in superpositions.-"'What's fascinating is, many of us tend to think of quantum mechanics applying on small scales," says David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT. "But it turns out that we can't escape quantum mechanics, even when we describe processes that happen over large distances. We can't stop our quantum mechanical description even when these things leave one state and enter another, traveling hundreds of miles. I think that's breathtaking."-***-"But what if these particles truly embodied distinct flavors at each moment in time, rather than being some ghostly, neither-here-nor-there phantoms of quantum physics? What if these neutrinos behaved according to Einstein's realism-based view of the world? After all, there could be statistical flukes due to defects in instrumentation, that might still generate a distribution of neutrinos that the researchers observed. Kaiser says if that were the case and "the world truly obeyed Einstein's intuitions," the chances of such a model accounting for the observed data would be "something like one in a billion."-"'What gives people pause is, quantum mechanics is quantitatively precise and yet it comes with all this conceptual baggage," Kaiser says."-Comment: The universe is truly non-local. Everything is interconnected through quantum mechanics.