SCIENCE MATTERS

Experiment could help explain why we, and all things, exist

An new experiment involves shooting neutrinos underground between two sites 735km apart.
The neutrinos zip through Earth virtually unhindered because they’re largely immune to most of nature’s forces, including forces that make other particles bounce off each other rather than go through each other. In fact, trillions of naturally produced neutrinos pass harmlessly through you each second.
A detector at the mine site catches some of the neutrinos from the beam, though only about one in a billion, thanks to this same tendency of theirs to soar through things. The detector is built to analyze how the neutrinos have changed during their trip.
All this effort is supposed to help edge science toward an understanding of why material things in the universe, such as our bodies and all the stuff around us, exist.
Neutrinos are the only material particles that respond significantly to just one of the four known physical forces: the Weak force. The experiment might help solve a problem in accounting for matter’s existence.

The difficulty is that the universe contains both matter and a sort of mirror-image matter called antimatter. The two tend to merge and annihilate each other. So if the universe in its infancy contained equal amounts of each—as certain principles of physics suggest it should have—all the stuff would have long since disappeared.

[The project is called MINOS, for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search.]