{"id":2868,"date":"2025-04-20T17:27:29","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T00:27:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/?p=2868"},"modified":"2025-05-07T22:40:51","modified_gmt":"2025-05-08T05:40:51","slug":"no-rest-for-the-massless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/2025\/04\/20\/no-rest-for-the-massless\/","title":{"rendered":"No Rest for the Massless"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sometimes the smallest things in the universe can answer some of the largest questions. That seems to be the case with neutrinos. Neutrinos are fundamental particles – which just means they are the smallest of the small and that they are indivisible. The name neutrino literally means electrically neutral (neutr-) and small (-ino). For a long time, scientists believed neutrinos had no mass. Now, it is known to have a mass, but nobody has been able to enumerate it. Despite their size (or maybe because of it) they are the most abundant particle in the universe. Every second, 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body without interacting with any particles in your body. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Noah at the Wilson Hall atrium at Fermilab, the national particle physics lab outside of Chicago where their experiments are based<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Noah Vaughan (they \/ them) is a PhD Student in the Physics Department at Oregon State University whose research focuses on experimental high energy particle physics, specifically neutrinos! They are co-author on over 50 publications, which is an incredible feat at this career stage and demonstrates the collaborative nature of the field. Noah works on the Main Injector Neutrino ExpeRiment to study v-A interactions (MINERvA) Project which is the first neutrino experiment in the world to use a high-intensity beam to study neutrino reactions with five different nuclei. Basically, MINERvA provides understanding on how neutrinos interact with other particles which inform scientists about the bigger role they play, including in star supernovas, the creation of the universe, and the structure of protons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Noah in the underground hall at Fermilab<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Noah\u2019s experiments for their dissertation were performed at Fermalab, which is 100 meters underground. That\u2019s something I bet a lot of PhD students couldn\u2019t claim! These experiments have given Noah a dataset with over 1,000,000 points, which is the largest of its type. The nature of neutrinos makes them difficult to study. They interact through gravity and something called the weak force. The weak force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature. It\u2019s much weaker than electromagnetism, but it\u2019s incredibly important. The weak force changes one type of particle into another. It\u2019s one of the driving forces in radioactive decay and helps fuel the sun through nuclear reactions. The weak force changes the identity or \u201cflavor\u201d of particles, at a very small range (smaller than the size of a proton). This allows neutrinos to navigate through atoms of massive objects without interacting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The top parts of the MINERvA detector that Noah helped rebuild for use in a new prototype detector to be used for DUNE, a future neutrino experiment. Each of the blue and red cylinders is a photomultiplier tube that reads out the light collected from the scintillation strips in the detector (Photo provided by Noah)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This all means that Noah\u2019s work is very important, and answering questions about some of the smallest things in the universe leads to answers to the biggest questions in the universe.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The front face of the MINERVA detector in its original commissioning (photo provided by Noah, from Reider Hahn at Fermilab)
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Written by Taylor Azizeh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes the smallest things in the universe can answer some of the largest questions. That seems to be the case with neutrinos. Neutrinos are fundamental particles – which just means they are the smallest of the small and that they are indivisible. The name neutrino literally means electrically neutral (neutr-) and small (-ino). For a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13955,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[155,1305742,904,1305744,523],"class_list":["post-2868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-oregon-state-university","tag-particle-physics","tag-physics","tag-quantum-physics","tag-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13955"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2868"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2892,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868\/revisions\/2892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}