![]() Neutrinos interact very weakly with other particles, so it took a nuclear reactor to produce enough neutrinos to be detected in the lab. Pauli proposed the neutrino in 1930, but its existence wasn’t solidly confirmed until 1956. So Enrico Fermi proposed the name neutrino, which is Italian for “little neutral one.” Pauli proposed calling it the neutron, but between the time he proposed the idea and the time it was accepted the particle we know as the neutron was discovered. Thus beta decay must emit both an electron and a small uncharged particle we now call the neutrino. However Wolfgang Pauli proposed the existence of an additional particle. What was going on here? One proposal, made by Niels Bohr, was that conservation of energy only held true on average, so that variations in the electron energies were due to some quantum fluctuation. But experiments demonstrated that the electron could have a wide range of energies. This meant the energy given to the electron should always be the same. So the amount of energy released during the decay should simply depend on difference in atomic masses of the two elements. The mass of a barium atom is less than the mass of a caesium atom, and Einstein had demonstrated that mass can be transformed to energy and vice versa. This process releases an electron, first known as a beta particle, hence the term beta decay.īut there was something rather strange about beta decay. ![]() When beta decay occurs an element such as caesium decays to barium. One process by which this can occur is known as beta decay. Recently I wrote about radioactive decay, where the atom of an unstable element can decay into another type of element, releasing energy in the process. 15 July 2013 University of Tokyo Kamioka Neutrino Observatory
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