...Neutrino Poetry ( John Updike (1932-2009) )...
...Neutrinos they are very small. They have no charge and have no mass And do not interact at all. The earth is just a silly ball To them, through which they simply pass, Like dustmaids down a drafty hall Or photons through a sheet of glass. They snub the most exquisite gas, Ignore the most substantial wall, Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass, Insult the stallion in his stall, And, scorning barriers of class, Infiltrate you and me! Like tall And painless guillotines, they fall Down through our heads into the grass. At night, they enter at Nepal And pierce the lover and his lass From underneath the bed – you call It wonderful; I call it crass...

 

 

 

 

 

 

We address fundamental questions about the origin, evolution and state of the universe by studying elementary particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are the most abundant fundamental massive particle in our universe - produced in celestial objects, in exploding stars (supernovae), in the sun, in atmosphere, in the Earth, in particle accelerators, and in nuclear power plants – and in numbers of trillions (harmlessly) stream though us every second. Neutrinos come in three different types, one of the mysterious properties of neutrinos is that they keep oscillating between all three types through a phenomenon called neutrino oscillations. The unique and mysterious properties of neutrinos help us better understand fundamental physics questions, such as - why there is more matter than antimatter in the Universe, the question that is fundamental to our understanding of how matter (and hence us) came to exist. This can be answered by observing if neutrino and antineutrino oscillate differently and if they violate charge-parity (CP) symmetry.