Please provide a rating, it takes seconds and helps us to keep this resource free for all to use
Welcome to our Physics lesson on Neutrino and Antineutrino, this is the fourth lesson of our suite of physics lessons covering the topic of Particles and Antiparticles - Interaction and Laws of Conservation, you can find links to the other lessons within this tutorial and access additional physics learning resources below this lesson.
As discussed in beta decay processes, neutrino and antineutrino are two antiparticles that are produced during these processes. The theoretical interpretation of beta minus decay with the presence of neutrino (or antineutrino in beta plus processes) was fully logical relying on the law of energy conservation. However, the practical identification of such particles relying on their interaction with other particles was very difficult.
According to theory, an antineutrino with sufficient energy can bring the following change when interacting with proton:
The probability of such a process is very small, so the only possibility to observe this phenomenon is using a very intense beam of antineutrons. It is known that every nuclear fission process in a reactor brings the emission of some beta minus fissions, i.e. the emission of some neutrinos (antineutrinos). Hence, because of technical difficulties the process of antineutrino identification was made possible only in 1956, when the technology of nuclear accelerators was improved.
You have reached the end of Physics lesson 21.2.4 Neutrino and Antineutrino. There are 6 lessons in this physics tutorial covering Particles and Antiparticles - Interaction and Laws of Conservation, you can access all the lessons from this tutorial below.
Enjoy the "Neutrino and Antineutrino" physics lesson? People who liked the "Particles and Antiparticles - Interaction and Laws of Conservation lesson found the following resources useful:
Please provide a rating, it takes seconds and helps us to keep this resource free for all to use
We hope you found this Physics lesson "Particles and Antiparticles - Interaction and Laws of Conservation" useful. If you did it would be great if you could spare the time to rate this physics lesson (simply click on the number of stars that match your assessment of this physics learning aide) and/or share on social media, this helps us identify popular tutorials and calculators and expand our free learning resources to support our users around the world have free access to expand their knowledge of physics and other disciplines.