Beta Decay and the Neutrino

In Section 17.4 in the 4th edition of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I discuss beta decay the neutrino.

The emission of a beta-particle is accompanied by the emission of a neutrino… [which] has no charge and no rest mass… [and] hardly interacts with matter at all… A particle that seemed originally to be an invention to conserve energy and angular momentum now has a strong experimental basis.

Understanding Physics:
The Electron, Proton, and Neutron,
by Isaac Asimov.

Our wording implies there is a story behind this particle “that seemed originally to be an invention to conserve energy.” Indeed, that is the case. I will let Isaac Asimov tell this tale. (Asimov's books, which I read in high school, influenced me to become a scientist.) The excerpt below is from Chapter 14 of his book Understanding Physics: The Electron, Proton, and Neutron.

In Chapter 11, disappearance in mass during the course of nuclear reactions was described as balanced by an appearance of energy in accordance with Einstein’s equation, e=mc². This balance also held in the case of the total annihilation of a particle by its anti-particle, or the production of a particle/anti-particle pair from energy.

Nevertheless, although in almost all such cases the mass-energy equivalence was met exactly, there was one notable exception in connection with radioactive radiations.

Alpha radiation behaves in satisfactory fashion. When a parent nucleus breaks down spontaneously to yield a daughter nucleus and an alpha particle, the sum of the mass of the two products does not quite equal the mass of the original nucleus. The difference appears in the form of energy—specifically, as the kinetic energy of the speeding alpha particle. Since the same particles appear as products at every breakdown of a particular parent nucleus, the mass-difference should always be the same, and the kinetic energy of the alpha particles should also always be the same. In other words, the beam of alpha particles should be monoenergetic. This was, in essence, found to be the case…

It was to be expected that the same considerations would hold for a parent nucleus breaking down to a daughter nucleus and a beta particle. It would seem reasonable to suppose that the beta particles would form a monoenergetic beam too…

Instead, as early as 1900, Becquerel indicated that beta particles emerged with a wide spread of kinetic energies. By 1914, the work of James Chadwick demonstrated the “continuous beta particle spectrum” to be undeniable.

The kinetic energy calculated for a beta particle on the basis of mass loss turned out to be a maximum kinetic energy that very few obtained. (None surpassed it, however; physicists were not faced with the awesome possibility of energy appearing out of nowhere.)

Most beta particles fell short of the expected kinetic energy by almost any amount up to the maximum. Some possessed virtually no kinetic energy at all. All told, a considerable portion of the energy that should have been present, wasn’t present, and through the 1920’s this missing energy could not be detected in any form.

Disappearing energy is as insupportable, really, as appearing energy, and though a number of physicists, including, notably, Niels Bohr, were ready to abandon the law of conservation of energy at the subatomic level, other physicists sought desperately for an alternative.

In 1931, an alternative was suggested by Wolfgang Pauli. He proposed that whenever a beta particle was produced, a second particle was also produced, and that the energy that was lacking in the beta particle was present in the second particle.

The situation demanded certain properties of the hypothetical particle. In the emission of beta particles, electric charge was conserved; that is, the net charge of the particles produced after emission was the same as that of the original particle. Pauli’s postulated particle therefore had to be uncharged. This made additional sense since, had the particle possessed a charge, it would have produced ions as it sped along and would therefore have been detectable in a cloud chamber, for instance. As a matter of fact, it was not detectable.

In addition, the total energy of Pauli’s projected particle was very small—only equal to the missing kinetic energy of the electron. The total energy of the particle had to include its mass, and the possession of so little energy must signify an exceedingly small mass. It quickly became apparent that the new particle had to have a mass of less than 1 percent of the electron and, in all likelihood, was altogether massless.

Enrico Fermi, who interested himself in Pauli’s theory at once, thought of calling the new particle a “neutron,” but Chadwick, at just about that time, discovered the massive, uncharged particle that came to be known by that name. Fermi therefore employed an Italian diminutive suffix and named the projected particle the neutrino (“little neutral one”), and it is by that name that it is known.