The Physics of Neutrinos, Vernon Barger, Danny Marfatia, and Kerry Whisnant, Princeton U. Press, 2012. $99.50 (224 pp.). ISBN 978-0-691-12853-5
A bit over a half century ago, physicists spotted their first neutrino. We now know that the particles are ubiquitous. They are of key importance to our understanding of nature as explored in such subdisciplines as particle physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. Neutrino physics has come a long way since that first experimental observation. Indeed, the field has become positively effervescent starting about a decade ago, when neutrino oscillations were experimentally confirmed.
In The Physics of Neutrinos, Vernon Barger and his longtime collaborators Danny Marfatia and Kerry Whisnant address the recent developments in the field. Barger is coauthor of Collider Physics (updated edition, Westview Press, 1996), the highly regarded handbook of collider-physics phenomenology. Relatively slim, The Physics of Neutrinos, a timely overview by active and respected researchers, is packed with useful information and many valuable references. The authors intertwine contributions of theory and experiments to present both the current status of the field and what may soon come.
The authors start by recalling the basic ingredients needed to understand neutrino measurements, describing how neutrinos are produced from weak decays, explaining what neutrino-interaction cross sections are, reviewing detector techniques, and discussing how to produce a neutrino beam. They continue with a description of the theoretical formalism needed to understand the experimentally observed neutrino oscillations in vacuum and in matter. From there, they discuss oscillation experiments involving solar, atmospheric, accelerator, and reactor neutrinos. The presentation culminates by summarizing our present knowledge of the values of the so-called neutrino-oscillation parameters, provided by a global fit of all the experimental data combined.
The Physics of Neutrinos also discusses current and planned long-baseline oscillation and nonoscillation experiments and their role in unraveling some of the remaining open questions. It covers present and future experiments designed to search for neutrinos from astrophysical sources other than the Sun, and it discusses such theoretical advances as the realization that neutrino self-interactions must be taken into account when dealing with supernova neutrinos. A short chapter devoted to model building outlines important theoretical efforts to explain patterns of neutrino masses and mixings and why neutrino masses are so small.
The penultimate chapter describes two results that may be indicative of new phenomena in the neutrino sector: the LSND and MiniBooNE anomalies, as they are known in the field. It also presents alternative theoretical scenarios to the standard paradigm of three neutrinos with masses and mixings. A minor drawback is the omission of the Gallium and Reactor anomalies, which, in my opinion, are on the same footing as the LSND and MiniBooNE ones.
Although The Physics of Neutrinos is not intended as a textbook, it may be of interest as a guide for graduate students who want to enter the field. For a graduate text, I recommend Rabindra Mohapatra and Palash Pal’s Massive Neutrinos in Physics and Astrophysics (3rd edition, World Scientific, 2004), which is more pedagogical and discusses some theoretical issues—in particular, models of neutrino mass—in greater detail. However, the Mohapatra and Pal book lacks the comprehensive experimental summary provided by Barger, Marfatia, and Whisnant; in that regard, the two books are complementary reads.
Anyone curious about the dramatic progress made in this pivotal area of particle physics would benefit from reading the introduction’s brief historical review, which notes many of the early achievements that have led us to where we are today. In my opinion, though, The Physics of Neutrinos should prove especially valuable to particle physicists, nuclear physicists, cosmologists, and astrophysicists who want to learn about the field. Neutrino researchers will certainly want to have it as a reference on their bookshelves.
Renata Zukanovich Funchal is a professor of physics at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. She has been working on neutrino physics since the early 1990s, mainly studying neutrino oscillations and neutrino phenomenology.
