A Franco-German experiment carried out in Grenoble calls into question the very existence of the sterile neutrino, an ideal candidate for “dark matter”.
Physicists can’t help it, it’s in their nature: when they feel a small pebble in their shoe, their first instinct is to tell themselves that it might be a nugget. Inevitably, they are often disappointed. The Franco-German collaboration Stereo has just announced in the journal Nature that after careful inspection of its shoe, the small grain that bothered it had nothing precious. In more scholarly terms: they confirmed the existence of a “reactor antineutrino anomaly” (we’ll see what it is) but unfortunately dismissed the idea that it could be attributed to the existence of a hypothetical particle, the sterile neutrino, after which the community has been chasing for more than 30 years. Not least because it would make an ideal candidate for the mysterious “dark matter” that influences the formation and evolution of all major structures in the universe (nothing less).
Let’s start with a little historical reminder in order to…
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