The Sox experiment planned at
the national nuclear physics lab at the Gran Sasso was called
off Thursday because of the lack of a Russian component, sources
said.
The National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and the
French commission for atomic energy (CEA) decided to scrub the
trial because the detector would not have been able to 'see'
sterile neutrinos, whose discovery could lead to a new era in
physics.
In a statement, the INFN said it had been "impossible to
create the technical characteristics necessary for the
experiment".
The project, which was to have lasted two years, aimed at the
complete confirmation or at a clear disproof of the so called
neutrino anomalies, a set of circumstantial evidences of
electron neutrino disappearance observed at LSND, MiniBoone,
with nuclear reactors and with solar neutrino Gallium detectors.
If successful, SOX would have demonstrated the existence of
sterile neutrino components and opened a brand new era in
fundamental particle physics and cosmology.
A solid signal would mean the discovery of the first
particles beyond the Standard Electroweak Model and would have
profound implications in our understanding of the Universe and
of fundamental particle physics.
A negative result would mean closing a long standing debate
about the reality of the neutrino anomalies, would probe the
existence of new physics in low energy neutrino interactions,
would provide a measurement of the neutrino magnetic moment, and
would yield a superb energy calibration for the key machine,
Borexino, which will be very beneficial for future
high-precision solar neutrino measurements.
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