Should we give up the myth of elusive neutrinos?

TGD leads to a proposal about Platonization of nuclear and atomic physics involving a holographic correspondence between the states of nuclei. As a matter of fact, Platonization could apply much more generally. The dramatic proposal looking total nonsense from standard model perspective is that atoms do not involve only electrons but also neutrinos with bind with the nuclear neutrinos by the dark variant weak interaction involving large value of effective Planck constant implying that weak bosons are effectively massless below atomic scale. This proposal forces to give up the myth of elusive neutrinos and would be essential also for understanding of living matter and chirality selection involving large parity violation but now it is more or less forced by Platonization.

There is a strong objection against the atomic realization of Platonization. In the standard view about atoms, one would have only the electrons assigned with F-2 free edges of the tessellation. Can one really say that the tessellation and the Hamiltonian cycle is present if there are no counterparts of the neutrons located at the nodes of the Platonic solid?

1. The easy but unsatisfactory option is to forget the idea about the existence of the geometric realization of the energy shells and the notion of Platonization in the case of atoms.
2. The mad scientist option is to ask what if the counterparts of neutrons do actually exist in atoms. The only possibility is that they are neutrinos, which bind to neutrons of the nucleus in the same way as electrons bind to the protons. This would realize nucleus-atom holography in a very strong sense. Atomic states would be holographic images of nuclear states: I have discussed this information-theoretically attractive idea for hadrons and also its generalization (see this).
3. The Standard model does not allow this since the weak length scale is quite too short. In the TGD framework weak interactions with large enough value of h_eff could have weak length scale, which is of order atomic length scale or even longer could become in rescue. Below the weak scale electroweak gauge bosons would be massless and this would make it possible to construct electroweak singlets by binding neutrons and neutrinos with opposite weak isospin together by using monopole flux tubes connecting neutrons and neutrons and neutrinos to "weak mesons". Electrons and protons with opposite weak isospin would form electroweak singlets in the same way and the holography between nuclei and atoms would be very precise.
4. In fact, TGD proposes electroweak confinement as a possible interpretation of electroweak massivation and the model for elementary particles in terms of screening neutrinos involving also right-handed neutrino (see this and this) to take care that fermion number comes out correctly. In biology the hypothesis that the electroweak scale can be of order of the scale of size scale the basic information molecules (DNA, proteins), cell membrane scale, or even cell size scale, would explain large parity breaking effects such as chiral selection and of course predict the long length scale quantum coherence explaining the coherence of living matter impossible to understand in the biology as chemistry only paradigm.
5. There is also a second argument in favor of the proposal. TGD allows to consider also the proposal that leptons are bound states of 3 antiquarks in very small scale, say that of single wormhole contact and of order CP₂ size scale (see this). This would trivialize the puzzle of matter-antimatter asymmetry and is favored as the simplest possible reduction of elementary particles to the bound states of fermions and antifermions. Leptons would represent antimatter and the twistor lift of TGD indeed predicts a small CP violation, which could favor the condensation of quarks to baryons and antiquarks to leptons (see this). The atoms could be seen as consisting of equal amounts of matter and antimatter.

Besides its apparent craziness, a reasonable looking justification for rejecting this hypothesis is that it looks completely untestable, at least in the framework of the standard model. But is the situation so gloomy in the TGD Universe?

1. Weak confinement in its strongest form means that the electron-proton pairs and neutron-neutrino pairs form electroweak singlets. The experimental situation is opposite to that in the case of hadron physics where one wants to see the quarks. The quark structure becomes visible only by using high enough collision energies. In atomic physics we see without any difficulty the electrons and neutrons and protons and electrons when the energies involved with the interactions of atoms are above say few keV, which corresponds to weaks scale of order atomic length scale.

   The challenge is to detect the weak confinement. This is possible by using weak interactions at low energies. One should observe the analogs of hadronic reactions. A basic example would be the transformation of the atomic electroweak singlet n+ν → p+e. The needed energy scale would be of the order of keV if the weak Compton length is of order atomic scale.

2. The good news is that is a well-established anomaly, so called tritium beta decay anomaly (see this) supporting the proposal! The tritium anomaly appears in the beta decay electron spectrum of tritium at the lower end of the electron energy spectrum for decays T=H³ → He³+ e+ν. In the standard model, this beta decay should correspond to the nuclear decay n→ p+W^- with W^- decaying to e+ν^* pair so that the tritium anomaly remains a mystery. The Kurie plot is linear near the endpoint where neutrino energy goes to zero and overshoots at the endpoint (by conservation laws the overshoot should not occur). This leads to a parametrization in which neutrino mass squared is negative. There is also a narrow bump in Kurie plot starting 5-10 eV below the endpoint.
   1. In TGD, this anomaly could correspond in a reasonable approximation to an atomic rather than nuclear process proceeding as n+ν → p+e instead of rather than n → p+e +ν^*. Here p has nuclear binding energy and ν has the analog of atomic binding energy. For n+ν bound state neutrino energy is small and if neutrinos have a small mass, the neutrino bound state energy is much smaller than neutrino mass. The contribution of neutrinos to the total energy of the initial and final state nuclei can be neglected. The rest masses of the initial and final states are m(H³)= 2809.257 MeV and m(H³)= 2809.239 MeV. The difference of these energies is Δ m=m(He³)-M(H³)=-.018 MeV and very small and the liberated energy does not go to electron and make it relativistic but reduces the strong binding energy by -Δ m. Therefore the transition n+ν → p+e might proceed as a transition between atomic states, at least if H³ is an excited state.

      As a consequence, the kinematics of the decay is effectively the same as that for the beta decay if the final state antineutrino has a negative energy -m_ν so that these transitions look like an anomaly at the end of beta decay spectrum.

      If the decay is identified as an ordinary beta decay, the energy of the neutrino is given by E= (p²+m_ν²)^1/2 in terms of its momentum p. This cannot give a negative energy for neutrino and the best one can achieve is E=0. This would require tachyonic neutrinos.

   2. One can estimate the change of the neutrino bound state energy in the transition by using energy conservation: m(H³) +E(ν,H³) = m(He³)+E(ν,He³). This gives Δ E(ν)== E(ν,H³) -E(ν,He³)= m(He³)-m(H³)=.018 MeV. This suggests rather a large scale for the neutrino binding energies, which is in conflict with the intuition that neutrinos have a small mass and have a Z⁰ Coulomb energy much smaller than its mass.

      A possible solution of the problem is that H³ is in an excited state with excitation energy in the range 1-10 keV. TGD leads to the proposal that these kinds of states exist and could relate to the existence of dark pseudo neutrinos which can be regarded as composites of dark proton and monopole flux tube carrying electron charge. This would explain why the solar X ray anomaly meaning the variation of nuclear decay rates correlating with the solar X ray flux suggests that X rays excite these states of atoms. Also the tritium beta decay anomaly shows annual variation (see this) suggesting that solar X rays generate excited states of H³ for which the reaction is possible leading to unbound state of electron and He³.

   3. That one sees a bump of width about 1-10 eV instead of a sharp peak in the spectrum could reflect the presence of different bound states of final state electrons. The scale of the electronic binding energies is indeed consistent with this (hydrogen ground state binding energy is E_H=13.6 eV giving for He³ energy of 4E_H=54.2 eV).
3. There exists also a second tritium related anomaly: anomalously low levels of thermonuclear tritium have been observed in the study of underground water movement in a chalk aquifier (see this). The anomalously low levels of tritium could be due to the transformations n+ν → p+e if the inverse process has a lower rate. This could be due to the kinematics of the process: there would be less phase space volume for the reversal of the process p+e → n+ν.
4. This mechanism is quite general and predicts the occurrence of nuclear transmutations based on the transformations of n+ ν pairs to p+e pairs or vice versa increasing the nuclear charge as a low energy. In biology these processes could be of special importance where there exists evidence that heavier elements appear as a kind of biofusion.

   This kind of transmutations might be involved also with "cold fusion" for which TGD provides a model. If it is possible to assign to a nucleus neutron halo, this process might allow it to generate nuclei with a higher value of nuclear charge and a new form of low energy alchemy would become possible. There is no need to emphasize its potential technological significance.

   To sum up, Platonization suggests that the myth of elusive neutrinos is wrong at low energies. The existence of long ranged weak interactions could also allow to improve the understanding of the neutrino-matter interactions.

See the article About Platonization of Nuclear String Model and of Model of Atoms or the chapter with the same title.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.