DONUT 2026-10-25
A Fermilab experiment that directly observed tau neutrino charged current interactions using nuclear emulsion and a prompt neutrino beam from an proton dump. Ds meson decays and the subsequent tau lepton decays supply the main tau-flavour component.
Electroweak interaction Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-18
The electroweak interaction is the gauge theory that unifies the weak and electromagnetic interactions.
An instructive tension motivates the unification: the photon is massless, while the W boson and Z boson are massive; electromagnetic interaction and weak interaction also have different observed low-energy strengths and chiral couplings. A gauge theory can relate their interactions while the Higgs field gives different masses after electroweak symmetry breaking. The resulting theory predicts relationships between processes, not merely a common name for observed phenomena.
Its useful organizing principle is the combination of weak isospin and hypercharge. The surviving electromagnetic generator is in the convention used here. The photon and Z boson are different mixtures of neutral gauge fields, while the charged current uses the charged combinations. The electroweak doublet gauge-boson mass matrix explains why one neutral mixture stays massless. At low energies, a massive W boson propagator instead produces the approximate Fermi interaction, withHere is the gauge coupling and the Higgs doublet vacuum expectation value. The inverse squared mediator mass suppresses low-energy weak rates. Unification does not require setting equal to the electromagnetic coupling : their relation is .
A striking experimental consequence is a neutral current in addition to the familiar charged current. The Gargamelle experiment tests this extra channel through visible charged secondaries, with a background problem fundamentally different from directly identifying a Z boson. The muon-neutrino electron recoil spectrum shows how the same Weinberg angle enters another process quantitatively.
Gargamelle Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
Gargamelle was a heavy-liquid bubble chamber at CERN. Its 1973 collaboration report, Observation of neutrino-like interactions without muon or electron in the Gargamelle neutrino experiment, by F. J. Hasert and colleagues, described hadronic events with no identified muon or electron and evaluated rates relative to charged current events. This is evidence for a neutral current, rather than direct production or photography of a Z boson.[ref]
Observation of neutrino-like interactions without muon or electron in the Gargamelle neutrino experiment by F. J. Hasert. Physics Letters B 46 (1973), pp. 138–140, title, abstract and author list
CERN's Gargamelle account identifies the target liquid as and distinguishes hadronic events from the separate isolated-electron signal. The latter is an antineutrino transferring momentum to an electron, whose electromagnetic particle shower supplies visible tracks. These are different final states, not two names for one event.[ref]
Forty years of neutral currents by Cian O’Luanaigh. Forty years of neutral currents, 19 July 2013, chamber description and isolated-electron caption
A neutrino beam uses protons striking a target to produce charged pions and kaons; focusing selects parents that undergo particle decay in flight. Their neutrinos pass through shielding into the target. Scanning photographs locates vertices and classifies outgoing tracks.[ref]
Expansion prepares a bubble chamber's superheated liquid; ionization by charged secondaries seeds bubbles for photography.[ref]
The recorded light reveals bubbles, not a directly visible incoming or outgoing neutrino. Reconstructing a vertex and classifying bubble-chamber tracks connects that optical record to a hypothesis about a particle interaction.
The collaboration compared samples with matched hadronic cuts. A flat longitudinal vertex distribution resembled neutrino interactions, but sideways neutrons and multi-step cascades could also flatten it. The background estimate combined visible parent-interaction/secondary-neutron pairs with a cascade calculation including surrounding material. Later proton exposures tested the predicted cascade lengths. Escaping charged hadrons could imitate muons; there was no independent perfect muon tag.[ref]
The inference combines positive evidence for an interaction with controlled alternatives for its visible final state. Shielding suppresses unwanted beam components, yet interactions in surrounding material can generate secondary neutrons; shielding alone cannot certify a neutral current. Nor does a successful neutral current search by itself establish every coupling or the Higgs mechanism. Its importance for the electroweak interaction is that the theory predicts an additional weak channel, with coupling relations that further cross section measurements can test.
Jacquet-Blondel reconstruction Created 2026-10-25 Updated 2026-11-05
In a head-on lepton-proton collision with the proton along , hadronic four-momentum conservation gives and . With , the reconstructed Bjorken scaling variable is . This is useful for charged current events whose final neutrino escapes. Initial-state radiation and unmeasured forward hadrons spoil the ideal closure.
MINOS 2026-10-25
A long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment using a Fermilab beam, near and far detectors, and magnetized iron/scintillator sampling calorimeters. A charged current muon neutrino event gives a negative muon and a hadronic shower; their reconstructed energies estimate the incident neutrino energy.
MSW effect 2026-10-25
Matter changes the effective mixing angle and level splitting of propagating neutrinos. The electron-flavour charged current potential is relative to the other active flavours. In the two-flavour Hamiltonian, equality of its two diagonal entries gives the displayed resonance condition. Adiabatic evolution through a varying density can therefore cause a large flavour change even when the local vacuum mixing angle is smaller. The equality alone does not guarantee adiabatic propagation.
Neutral current Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
The weak neutral current couples the Z boson to a fermion without changing its electric charge. Its vector and axial-vector coefficients depend on weak isospin, electric charge, and the weak mixing angle.
The neutral current transfers no electric charge at a fermion vertex; “neutral” does not mean that every participating particle is uncharged. For example, transfers energy and momentum to an electron through Z boson exchange. By contrast, a charged current can convert a muon neutrino into a muon, as in . Both processes conserve total electric charge. A photon also carries no electric charge, but an active neutrino has no electromagnetic charge coupling: its neutral current is a distinct weak interaction.
The experimentally useful contrast on a nucleon target iswhere is a nucleon and is an allowed final state of hadrons. The charged current makes a charged lepton available for identification; the outgoing neutrino in a neutral current leaves no bubble-chamber track. A sample of hadronic events without an identified muon therefore poses an experimental question: how many could instead be neutron interactions, or charged current events whose muon was missed? The answer requires a detector-response and background analysis, not merely an inspection for an absent line.
Neutrino matter potential Created 2026-10-25 Updated 2026-11-05
Coherent forward weak scattering in ordinary matter changes neutrino propagation phases. The charged-current electron contribution gives the displayed potential difference, with the opposite sign for antineutrinos. A common neutral-current term can be removed from active-flavour oscillations. A sufficiently large effect requires propagation with the matter Hamiltonian rather than the vacuum formula.
OPERA experiment 2026-10-25
A long-baseline tau-appearance experiment with the CERN-to-Gran-Sasso muon neutrino beam. Lead targets and nuclear emulsion resolve a short tau lepton decay after a tau neutrino charged current interaction.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2002 iii Paper 66 1 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Use and . For each generation , the leptons areBoth are color singlets. The conjugate antilepton fields transform in the conjugate representations and have opposite hypercharge; they are already included by the conjugate fields in the Lagrangian. The two components of have electric charges , and has charge . There is no right-handed neutrino representation in this field content. These assignments use the electroweak representation and hypercharge table in the same hypercharge normalization as the scalar doublet.
For a doublet of hypercharge , defineThe term is absent for a singlet. Under the local transformation , the gauge fields transform so that . Consequently the required gauge-covariant kinetic terms areThe fields of definite chirality are defined with . Since has hypercharge , the Yukawa interactionis invariant: its hypercharges add to zero, and contracts the two doublet indices. A bare charged-lepton mass violates these assignments. No renormalizable neutrino Yukawa term is available without a right-handed neutrino. A gauge-invariant scalar potential depending on can select the nonzero vacuum, without altering these kinetic and Yukawa constructions.
There is an explicit local unitary gauge transformation whenever :Thus, with the real field ,This proves the polar coordinates for the electroweak Higgs doublet constructively. The gauge choice is local about the nonzero vacuum; it need not be nonsingular at zeros of the doublet.
The three identical-generation kinetic terms permit unitary flavor changes. A singular value decomposition gives with . Rotate both components of each left doublet together, and the right singlets independently. In this basis,The left/right cross terms combine into this Dirac mass. Since the neutrinos have no mass matrix, their simultaneous left rotation preserves a diagonal charged current. This is charged-lepton Yukawa matrix diagonalization; the neutrinos remain massless in the stated renormalizable model.
The scalar kinetic term givesIntroduce and . The combinations , , and therefore diagonalize the quadratic terms:The factor applies to the real neutral field, not to the complex charged field. The massless photon corresponds to the unbroken generator , which annihilates the vacuum. This gives the electroweak doublet gauge-boson mass matrix and its diagonal spectrum.
Past exam of the nuclear and particle physics course of the University of Oxford 2021 1 a Solution Created 2026-10-25 Updated 2026-11-05
All three interactions respect color charge; quark flavor is conserved by the strong interaction and the electromagnetic interaction, but can change in the weak interaction. These statements concern charges and net numbers, rather than an unchanging inventory of particles.
A quark transforms in the fundamental representation of the color charge gauge group . The strong interaction can change an individual quark's colour by exchanging a gluon, which itself carries color charge. For example, the colour flow is allowed: demanding that the outgoing quark remain red would be incorrect. At each interaction vertex the full colour flow is conserved. The colourless photon, W boson, and Z boson instead couple to a quark with an identity factor in colour space. A weak charged current can therefore change to , but cannot turn into without another coloured participant. External isolated hadrons are colour singlets; confinement prevents direct observation of a free coloured state.
For each quark flavor , define the net quark flavor number . The strong interaction and electromagnetic interaction preserve every : pair creation , for example, changes neither net strangeness nor any other . Their quark couplings are diagonal in quark flavor. The weak charged current contains , where is the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix, and changes these net numbers. Weak neutral currents are diagonal in tree-level Feynman diagrams; flavor-changing neutral currents can occur through higher-order Feynman diagrams.
The observed hierarchy of mean lifetimes and decay channels supplies evidence: associated strange-particle production through the strong interaction preserves net strangeness, whereas a kaon's weak interaction decay to pions changes it. The electromagnetic interaction process has zero net quark flavor before and after annihilation. Neutrino oscillations show that individual lepton family numbers are not exact conserved quantities. Within the usual effectively massless-neutrino approximation, charged current decays such as preserve family numbers only when the emitted neutrinos are counted.
Evidence for three colours includes the hadronic R ratio , the colour multiplicities in W boson decay widths, and three-jet events revealing gluon radiation. These test quantum chromodynamics and its colour structure together; they are not direct measurements of a named red or blue charge on a free quark.
The electroweak gauge group is . Left-handed fermions form weak-isospin doublets and right-handed charged fermions are singlets under . Before symmetry breaking the gauge fields are and , with couplings . A Higgs-doublet vacuum expectation value breaks the symmetry to electromagnetic .
In units , the physical combinations and tree-level relations areThe photon remains massless. charged currents change members of weak doublets, whereas the mediates weak neutral currents with parity-dependent couplings. At low energies exchange reduces to the Fermi contact interaction, ; the apparent weak suppression reflects the massive mediator. This unifies the gauge description, not the numerical equality of all low-energy couplings.[ref]
A Model of Leptons by Steven Weinberg. 1967, gauge structure, symmetry breaking and vector-boson mass relations
Neutral-current neutrino interactions and subsequent observation of massive weak vector bosons tested this structure. In a neutral-current neutrino experiment, an isolated hadronic interaction without an accompanying charged lepton is a candidate signal; entering neutral hadrons and missed charged-current leptons are important backgrounds. Gargamelle's neutral-current evidence supplied a direct experimental check beyond ordinary beta decay.[ref]
Treat the electron and electron antineutrino as effectively massless particles in the centre-of-momentum frame, retain only the charged current, and use the Fermi interaction: . Take between incoming and outgoing electron antineutrino directions. The V-A interaction selects a right-helicity electron antineutrino and a left-helicity electron. Their opposite incoming directions give total angular momentum projection one. The outgoing pair has the same projection along its own axis. The Wigner D-matrix element is , so the squared helicity amplitude is proportional to . The inactive initial electron helicity is included in the unpolarized normalization supplied by the paper.
The boost from the centre-of-momentum frame to the laboratory frame has , while the incoming electron antineutrino has and . ThusThe requested identity therefore uses ; it is not exact at finite target mass. With , the absolute Jacobian determinant is , givingThe suppression at backward scattering follows from angular momentum conservation: rotating projection through cannot leave projection along the original axis. Replacing by gives the supplied dependence.
Use the parton model, neglect antiquarks, binding and target mass corrections, quark masses, muon mass, QCD scaling violation and the W boson propagator correction. The struck quark is effectively free during the short interaction and carries parton momentum fraction , giving . The charged current reaction is . Its helicity amplitude has the same factor as in a. Define the effective parton distribution function by , summing only kinematically accessible final quarks; for valence-only protons and accessible this is approximately . It is not the unweighted sum .Here is the inclusive deep inelastic scattering variable, and in the scaling limit. Integrating gives , henceThe moment measures the momentum fraction in the active quarks. Approximate linearity is evidence for scattering from pointlike spin-one-half constituents with approximately scale-independent parton distribution functions, rather than coherent scattering from an extended proton. It is an intermediate-energy prediction: thresholds, experimental deep inelastic scattering cuts, QCD scaling violation and eventually the finite W boson propagator modify it.
The Fermilab primary proton beam strikes a target, producing secondary pions and kaons. Horn focusing selects positive parents; their decays and produce a predominantly muon neutrino beam. A decay tunnel permits decay before the remaining charged secondaries encounter an absorber. A near detector constrains the flux and interaction spectrum, while the distant MINOS detector measures its change.
The alternating scintillation counters and magnetized iron give a sampling calorimeter and a magnetic tracking volume. A charged current event has a long negative muon track and a localized hadronic shower. Estimate by range if contained or magnetic curvature if exiting, and by the calibrated scintillator pulse-height sum. Reconstruct , with corrections for nuclear binding, invisible energy and detector response. The muon charge separates most wrong-sign muon antineutrino events; short showers without the track are primarily neutral current candidates. The source's baseline is used in the calculations below.
The tau-neutrino charged-current threshold requires specifying the stationary target and the lightest allowed final state. For a free neutron, the lowest charged current channel is . At threshold both final particles are at rest relative to one another in the centre-of-momentum frame, soThe equal-nucleon-mass approximation gives . More generally for a target of mass and a recoil system with minimum allowed invariant mass . A stationary electron in instead gives . The customary answer therefore presumes a nucleon target; nuclear thresholds and practical deep inelastic scattering thresholds differ.
Past exam of the particle physics course of the University of Oxford 2015 5 b Solution Created 2026-10-25 Updated 2026-11-05
In a dense beam dump, long-lived pions and kaons usually interact and lose energy before decaying. Their residual stopped decays yield low-energy neutrinos, below the useful high-energy tau-interaction sample. Prompt charmed mesons have much shorter lifetimes and can decay before reinteraction. This suppresses the conventional muon neutrino background relative to the prompt component. The production sequence is quantum chromodynamics creation of , principally with also allowed, followed by hadronization and its charge conjugate. The process includes both quark-exchange diagrams and the three-gluon diagram. Fragmentation also produces other hadrons; the proton does not turn directly into one isolated Ds meson.The charge-conjugate chain gives a prompt tau antineutrino and a secondary tau neutrino. Thus each leptonic Ds meson chain produces both tau-flavour signs. The corresponding Feynman diagrams are shown in a.
For the CKM matrix, diagonalizing the up/down quark mass matrices by leaves in the charged current:The three-generation unitary matrix has three physical mixing angles and one CP violation phase after field rephasings. At fixed kinematics and hadronic matrix element, rates are proportional to ; phase space, parent lifetimes, form factors and helicity suppression must also be included when comparing branching fractions.
For a charged pseudoscalar meson , leptonic pseudoscalar decay width givesThe Ds meson channel is Cabibbo-favoured, , whereas the charged D meson channel uses . Taking , and in GeV givesIncluding the approximate lifetime ratio and the given production ratio gives a tau yield ratio about , already much greater than one even with equal decay constants. This is an illustrative estimate using approximate additional mass/lifetime inputs, not a determination from the production cross sections alone. A neutral D meson cannot annihilate to the charged pair by electric charge conservation; its semileptonic tau modes have insufficient phase space once the required strange or nonstrange recoil hadron is included. Light mesons are below threshold; bottom production is much smaller at this fixed-target energy. Consequently neither the larger production rate nor ordinary light-hadron production outweighs the Ds meson tau source. [ref]
Final tau-neutrino results from the DONuT experiment by DONUT Collaboration. DONuT final analysis: prompt beam production and tau-neutrino flux model
For this dump scheme, there is no practical parent-sign or lifetime selection that isolates only the relatively rare Ds meson tau channel: other charmed hadrons promptly produce electron neutrinos and muon neutrinos by semileptonic decay. Both electron and muon modes have the same charged current couplings and similar available phase space, so comparable and fluxes are plausible. The tau lepton also decays into electron and muon channels. A rare tau-producing channel cannot remove the abundant prompt backgrounds, and its two-step chain emits both tau-flavour signs.
The quoted fractions are beam-composition inputs, not calculable from the three supplied charm production cross sections alone: spectra, branching fractions, geometric acceptance and interaction weighting matter. Impossibility of a pure tau source is a practical statement about this production method, not a fundamental prohibition on selecting tau flavour at an oscillation maximum.
Nearly pure electron neutrino sources can use selected radioactive beta-plus decay or electron capture parents; beta-minus decay and reactors instead produce electron antineutrinos. A boosted radioactive-ion beam gives directional electron-flavour flux. Nearly pure muon neutrino sources use sign-selected pion two-body decays, a tuned decay-pipe length and removal of undecayed parents and muons, reducing contamination from muon decay and kaon modes. Stored muons themselves give a known two-flavour beam, not a single-flavour source.
In , charge and missing four-momentum show an invisible neutral component beyond the visible charged lepton. The distributions are consistent with three-body V-A interaction decay; hadronic modes such as instead have two-body missing-mass kinematics. Production and decay accounting assigns and their antiparticles minus one. Searches for wrong-flavour and neutrinoless channels constrain violations. These observations establish a useful approximately conserved tau-family number in ordinary interactions, rather than proving an exact law from missing energy alone.
To establish that the invisible particle is distinct from and , combine decay evidence with the absence of unsuppressed tau production by conventional electron- and muon-flavour beams, and direct tau neutrino charged current interactions. DONUT observed the short displaced tau lepton decay in nuclear emulsion after a neutrino interaction. [ref]
Observation of Tau Neutrino Interactions by DONUT Collaboration. DONUT first direct tau-neutrino interaction report
Neutrino oscillation means individual family numbers are not exact conserved quantities during propagation, even though they are an excellent approximation for these local decay assignments.Nuclear fusion in the Sun produces predominantly electron neutrinos, through the pp chain and subsidiary reactions. The historical solar-neutrino deficit could have reflected either a source-model error or flavour transformation. In a two-flavour approximation, mixing gives the vacuum survival law derived in a. In matter the additional electron neutrino charged current potential is . Dropping a common diagonal term, the flavour Hamiltonian isThe MSW effect enhances mixing near . An initially electron-like high-density state follows its instantaneous mass eigenstate approximately adiabatically as solar density falls. After phase averaging, high-energy solar survival approaches , while low-energy vacuum-averaged survival approaches , neglecting the small third-angle correction.
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory used about a kilotonne of heavy water viewed by photomultipliers. Its three channels separate flavour from total active flux:The charged current channel measures electron flavour, the neutral current channel measures all active flavours nearly equally, and elastic scattering is more sensitive to electron flavour but also detects the others. Cherenkov radiation gives the charged-particle energy and direction. Neutrons were detected through capture gamma rays, with later salt loading and dedicated counters improving the neutral-current separation. The different angular patterns, light isotropy and energy spectra permit a combined channel fit, with radioactive backgrounds and calibrations controlled.
The measured electron flux was lower than the total active flux, while the latter agreed with solar fusion expectations. This directly established a non-electron component and removed a simple overall source-flux error as the explanation. [ref]
Direct evidence for neutrino flavor transformation from neutral current interactions by SNO Collaboration. SNO neutral-current flavour-transformation report, 2002
Super-Kamiokande supplied high-statistics directional elastic-scattering data; radiochemical chlorine/gallium experiments supplied complementary thresholds, and reactor antineutrino disappearance independently confirmed the solar mass-squared difference. Together these support large-angle mixing at rather than the atmospheric splitting in c.