Neutrino query

lacuna

I'm doing leaving cert physics option 1(particle physics)and i've been reading over leptons and there's mention of the six leptons known at present-the electron,the muon,the tau and the neutrinos associated with these which are the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino. It doesnt mention anything more about them and I was wondering if anyone could give me a brief explanation as to what these neutrinos actually are?

davej

Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles in the universe. They are very difficult to detect because they remain basically unaffected by most of the forces, passing through large amounts of matter without interaction.

See here for more info:

http://www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/neutrino.html

davej

planck2

neutrinos or " little neutral one " as mr.fermi put it are quite correctly one of the fundamental particles of nature.they are indeed very difficult to detect , because they have zero charge as the name indicates , and have a rest mass of very close to zero , an upper limit on their rest mass being approximately 3 electron volts.experiments are on going as to determine whether or not they do actuallly have mass, such as the superkamiokande one in japan where they filled a tank with 50,000 litres of pure water surrounded by photomultiplier tubes, there are others there is one in canada and theres one in the old cold mines of south dakota in the states and i think there is a place in europe as well.