Neutrinos
My group is involved in physics at long baseline neutrino experiments in the US, specifically Fermilab-based experiments. We are currently taking and analyzing data from the NOvA experiment. We are also involved in research and development on the proposed Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).
Neutrino physics is an extermely interesting area of high energy physics. The observation of neutrino oscillations is the first direct evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model, which predicted that neutrinos are massless, and hence cannot oscillate. Furthermore, neutrinos are currently at the forefront of particle physics as they have the potential answer to the question of why the universe has the matter-antimatter makeup we see today. Charge-parity (CP) violation in the quark sector is not sufficiently large to account for the observed matter-antimatter imbalance and it may be possible that CP violation in the neutrino sector could account for the lack of antimatter. Due to the fact that neutrinos only interact via the weak force, immense beams of neutrinos and novel detectors must be constructed to detect their interactions. While the challenges that come with neutrino physics are non-trivial, the potential rewards of studying them are well worth the effort.
NOvA Far Detector
