Friday 2 November 2007

Neutrino Telescopes, fall to find point sources.


With physicists building big neutrino detectors like IceCube (picture is a mock event at IceCube)
and Anteras astrophysicists where hoping for a completely new way of seeing the universe. However the first results for neutrino astronomy coming the old Super Kamiokande labs,
and from around 1500 neutrino in the TeV range, the've found Nothing, no point sources, no excess from the Sun, no excess from the galactic center, and even no excess from cosmic ray interactions with intersteller gas in our spiral arms. The're picture of incoming neutrino directions was pretty much isotropic.

Now this is not what people where expecting at all, from the using theory of WIMPS for dark matter, dark matter anhillation should have left plenty of sources in the neutrino sky, especially the sun and galactic center. But even without dark matter, there should have been excesses from cosmic rays interactions and from pulsars. The null result looks difficult to explain, unless neutrino feel some field (like a magnetic field but not the usual magnetic field) thats scrambing up the direction they fly in.

Well i had the idea that neutrinos get a gauge force to themselves
for while now, so i'm biased and always look for confirmations
of my idea first in any paper i read, but can
anyone see any other reason for the null results from SuperK?