To assure confidence in their results, the physicists wrote in their paper that different aspects of the BEST experiment were double-checked and they “found no cause for concern”. The most straightforward explanation for the discrepancy, say the team, is that some of the neutrinos emitted by the chromium source were transformed into their “sterile” counterparts, which do not interact with gallium. One of the advantages of the BEST experiment over its predecessors was the use of two volumes of gallium rather than one, making measurements more accurate. Interestingly, they found that germanium production was about 20% lower than expected, which turns out to be in agreement with the results obtained by SAGE and GALLEX experiments that utilized a similar idea but had lower accuracy. The scientists used this as a means of detecting the unknown particles by comparing the amount of gallium converted to germanium with theoretical predictions. When bombarded with neutrinos, gallium atoms interact with them and become germanium atoms and electrons, which can be measured. The facility consisted of a neutrino source - a chromium isotope - and two surrounding, nested volumes of gallium. To find out if this new type of neutrino is real, an international team of physicists designed an experiment named the Baksan Experiment on Sterile Transitions (BEST). This property makes it a good candidate as a constituent of dark matter as it should not interact with other particles other than gravity. However, scientists suspect that more neutrinos exist and have put forward an idea that there may be a particle of this kind that does not participate even in weak interactions: the sterile neutrino. They can transform into one another, are orders of magnitude lighter than an electron, and interact with other particles very weakly. There are three known types of neutrinos in nature - electron, muon, and tau - and all of them are truly remarkable. One of the best explanations for this phenomenon - which has already been observed before but with lower accuracy - is that the neutrino becomes an unknown particle that does not interact with the others. In a new study, a team of physicists measured the number of neutrinos emitted by a radioactive isotope of chromium and found a deficit compared to theoretical predictions.
But new research hints that it may have an even more elusive cousin. This is because it participates only in weak and gravitational interactions with other particles. The neutrino is sometimes called the “ghost particle” because it is extremely hard to detect.
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