What is the mass of a particle? Physicists have 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 800-244-0167 It's small, but it can't be zero because of one of the particle's most fundamental features. There is plenty of room for interpretation.
The solution might be found by thinking outside of the box.
Physicists from the University of Tsukuba, Kyoto University, and the University of Tokyo in Japan have taken this advice to heart, using a revolutionary new method for modeling a significant chunk of the Universe to act as a testing ground for the subtle influence of neutrinos on the evolution of
It's an idea that has been tested before. The researchers behind the new model think they can iron out some of the previous method's flaws by applying a simulation used in other areas of physics.
Neutrinos have been a part of the standard model of physics since 1930 and have been confirmed since the 1950s.
The particle should be massless. They come in a variety of forms, but scientists have figured out that they can change as they move.
Physicists are confident that neutrinos have a mass. If there was no mass, the neutrinos would move at the speed of light in a vacuum, so they wouldn't be changing at all.
It's safe to say that we have a mass between zip and 1/500,000th of an electron's mass.
This new method might bring us closer to that number, though reconstructing most of a Universe to weigh something that barely exists isn't without its irony.
What the neutrino lacks in punch it makes up for in sheer numbers.
Neutrinos have been a part of the Universe for a long time, being churned out of the roiling vacuum within the first second of the Big bang.
The neutrally-charged background of the leftover radiation we see today is just like the static hum of the leftover radiation we saw in the past.
There's a good chance that relic neutrinos had an influence on the structure of the Universe. It's difficult to figure out what kind of effect it is.
In a typical physics model of a solar system, for example, you might select a number of objects, define their behaviors with respect to one another, map them in 3D space, and let a computer calculate what happens over time.
Want more things? Get a faster computer.
For large-scale simulations, such 'N-body' simulations can work well. They have their limits when they are rubbed up against a more quantum nature.
Classical particles play by the same rules as quantum objects. It's difficult to say how different types of Neutrinos stirred up the early Universe.
The equation from the Vlasov simulation was used in the model. The team was able to describe relic neutrinos as if they were a continuous medium because of the plasma-based equations.
The program could be used on a range of scales, and it was shown that it could be fairly accurate representations of the structure of most of the observable Universe.
The largest simulation self-consistently combines the Vlasov simulation on 400 trillion grids with 330 billion-body calculations, and it accurately reproduces the complex dynamics of cosmic neutrinos.
Future work will need to be done to get a more precise figure for the relic's mass. The innovation earned the team recognition in the form of a finalist's place in the Gordon Bell Prize.
Their new way of modeling large-scale structures is a potential win for physicists who want to learn how much mass a neutrino commands, and it could also be used in other areas.
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis was the subject of this research.
