{"id":17154,"date":"2025-04-13T18:10:20","date_gmt":"2025-04-13T18:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/17154\/"},"modified":"2025-04-13T18:10:20","modified_gmt":"2025-04-13T18:10:20","slug":"physicists-narrow-down-neutrinos-mysterious-mass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/17154\/","title":{"rendered":"Physicists narrow down neutrino\u2019s mysterious mass"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"figure__image\" alt=\"A Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment researcher looks into the main spectrometer of the device at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/d41586-025-01157-1_50850550.jpg\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"figure__caption u-sans-serif\">The main spectrometer of the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment.Credit: Uli Deck\/dpa via Alamy<\/p>\n<p>The most advanced attempt yet to weigh neutrinos has put a new upper limit on the enigmatic particle\u2019s mass. It is no heavier than 0.45 electron volts (eV) \u2014 less than one-millionth the mass of an electron, the next-lightest known particle at 511,000 eV. The results were described on 10 April in Science<a href=\"#ref-CR1\" data-track=\"click\" data-action=\"anchor-link\" data-track-label=\"go to reference\" data-track-category=\"references\">1<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>To this day, neutrinos are the only elementary particles whose mass is unknown. Measuring it could provide a crucial clue to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-021-01955-3\" data-track=\"click\" data-label=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-021-01955-3\" data-track-category=\"body text link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">how the particle acquires its mass<\/a> in the first place \u2014 whether through the Higgs boson, as all other massive particles do, or through some other mechanism yet to be discovered, says Susanne Mertens, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. Knowing their mass could also shed light on how neutrinos originating from the Big Bang have influenced the formation of galaxies, she adds.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-024-00620-9\" class=\"u-link-inherit\" data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"recommended article\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"recommended__image\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/d41586-025-01157-1_26844392.jpg\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"recommended__title u-serif\">How heavy is a neutrino? Race to weigh mysterious particle heats up<\/p>\n<p><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The main spectrometer of the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment.Credit: Uli Deck\/dpa via Alamy The most advanced attempt&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17155,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3845],"tags":[3965,3966,5538,74,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-17154","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","9":"tag-multidisciplinary","10":"tag-particle-physics","11":"tag-physics","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114332003563135174","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}