Mass determination of nutrinos

The authors have developed a time-energy correlation method (called the correlation mass method) to determine the signature of a nonzero neutrino mass in a small sample of neutrinos detected from a distant source. They apply this method to the Kamiokande II (KII) and Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven (IMB) observations of neutrino bursts attributed to Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). They obtain a neutrino rest mass of 3.6 eV. A further analysis, using Monte Carlo simulations that allow the energy of each event in the KII data set to vary with a Gaussian distribution that has the experimentally quoted mean and deviation, yields a further estimate for the neutrino rest mass of 2.8+2.- 1.4 eV. The analysis also suggests that the KII data describe an initial neutrino pulse of less than 0.3 sec full width, followed by an emission tail lasting at least ten seconds