Los Alamos Accelerator Group Reports Its Evidence for Neutrino Oscillation

AUG 01, 1995

A handful of muon neutrinos at the LAMPF accelerator appear to have undergone a metamorphosis. If it’s true, it tells us that some neutrinos have mass.

DOI: 10.1063/1.2808120

Bertram M. Schwarzschild

Despite its somewhat hectic provenance, the paper submitted to Physical Review Letters in June by the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector collaboration at Los Alamos brings us the first serious evidence of neutrino oscillation in an accelerator experiment. All previous substantial hints of neutrino oscillation have come from astrophysical sources, over which experimenters have no control. (See PHYSICS TODAY, April, page 19.) The LSND result, like all the astrophysical evidence, is still inconclusive. But it has set the particle physics and cosmological communities abuzz.

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