The quest for the mass of the neutrino

The news hit the International community of particle physicists like a bombshell. A team at Fermilab, the famous US research center near Chicago working on the Donut experiment (Direct Observation of the Nu Tau) announced that it had finally located the trace of the tau neutrino. This is the last of the twelve representatives of the building blocks of life as expounded in the Standard Model. The 'portrait' of the particle still has to be drawn in other words its still-unknown mass has to be determined - as physicists will have to find the masses of two other neutrinos in the Standard Model (the electron neutrino and the muon neutrino). For this undertaking, researchers have devised unusual experiments best summed by the word 'glant'. Several CNRS laboratories are involved in one such experiment called CNGS