Ah! That makes sense!
Thanks for all of your help; this really helps me connect the language in the popular science articles to that in the papers they link to.
Great! OK, last question for now: most of the treatments I see for this restrict the discussion to the electron neutrino. But there are 3 families of neutrino. Would the right-handed neutrino in most treatments of the problem be a right-handed electron neutrino, or a new, fourth type of neutrino...
Thanks.
I found this:
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/staff/academic/boyd/stuff/neutrinolectures/lec_neutrinomass_writeup.pdf
which also helps a lot. They key I was missing is that popular stories about the "sterile" neutrino are often actually talking about right-handed neutrinos—I...
An example:
Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur, Lancaster & Blundell, p. 330, sidenote 11: "Neutrinos only exist as left-handed particles. They are (at least approximately) massless…"
I understand this; my question might have been better phrased as: given that we know neutrinos have...
I'm puzzled why, now that we know that neutrinos have mass, we still read that there are only left-handed neutrinos, as far as we know.
I understand that right-handed neutrinos do not interact by the weak force, so we would not detect them. My question is why we read that they might not /...