US could beam neutrinos to Japan Mar 6, 2002 A beam of neutrinos
could be fired nearly ten thousand kilometres through the Earth
in an experiment proposed by Fritz DeJongh at Fermilab. DeJongh
hopes to persuade Japanese particle physicists to build a new
detector at the SuperKamiokande site to analyse a beam of
neutrinos sent by a powerful generator currently under
construction at Fermilab in the US. Passing through so much
matter should alter the beam in a way that makes it possible to
establish the masses of the three different types of neutrino,
and to study ‘charge-parity violation’ (arXiv.org/abs/hep-
ex/0203005). Neutrinos are difficult to study because they have
very little mass and interact only weakly with matter. They also
‘oscillate’ between three possible ‘flavours’ – electron, muon
and tau – each of which has a different mass. Previous
observations of these oscillations have revealed the differences
between these masses, but have not established the masses
themselves. But DeJongh believes that a ‘