The neutrinos are an integral part of the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, which is a theoretical description of the building blocks of the universe and the interactions between these subatomic bricks. Online neutrino chart Physicist Vittorio Paolone was already a leader of the experiment conducted at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago when he joined the University of Pittsburgh in 1997. The team included more than 50 scientists from the United States, Japan, Korea and Greece. Paolone, who could not be reached for comment yesterday, will be attending a symposium at Fermilab this afternoon to discuss results that will have scientists breathing a collective sigh of relief. Then a lot of the accepted theory would be in some difficulty.
Neutrinos are very difficult to produce and detect.
But they don't bother you because they don't interact. Despite such indifferent natures, electron neutrinos were discovered in 1952 and muon neutrinos in 1962. But tau neutrinos remained elusive. Their existence was suggested in 1978 when researchers at Stanford University found a charged particle called a tau lepton, which is produced by a tau neutrino. In 1997, the Fermilab team generated an intense beam of neutrinos, which theoretically had to include trillions of the tau variety.