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First result gives hint of neutrinos changing!

The T2K experiment today released their first ever physics result which has also given us our first evidence of a previously unseen phenomenon.

The experiment studies the Universe's most mysterious particles, known as "neutrinos", which exhibit a behaviour known as "neutrino oscillations". There are three distinct types of neutrino (electron, muon and tau) but as they travel they can change back and forth from one to the other. So just because you had a muon neutrino to begin with, you might not have a muon neutrino later!

In T2K, an accelerator on Japan's East coast produces a beam of muon neutrinos, then fires them almost 300km through Japan to a detector at Kamioka. What the experiment has observed, for the first time, is a hint that some of those muon neutrinos are oscillating into electron neutrinos. With many experiments around the world racing to be the first to observe this effect, T2K's publication of this hint will be a significant result in the particle physics community.

Measuring such oscillations is a crucial step in our attempts to explain why the Universe is now made almost entirely of matter and not equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, as it was at the big bang: the biggest open question in particle physics.

If it were not for the devastating earthquake earlier this year, T2K would have most likely been able to confirm this result, instead of seeing just a hint, so all eyes will be watching for what happens when the experiment restarts in the near future!


If you'd like someone to comment on this significant result, Warwick's Dr Gary Barker and Dr Steve Boyd have been working on T2K for over 6 years.

Wed 15 Jun 2011, 09:21 | Tags: Press Releases, Warwick, News, Publicity, Publication

T2K's First Paper Online

T2K's first paper as a collaboration is now available!

The 'first paper' is a significant milestone in a collaboration's history, marking a definite departure from construction and preparation into producing physics results.

The paper, which describes the experiment's construction and operation, will be published in the journal Nuclear Instruments and Methods next month. Until then you view it on the arXiV at the following address: http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.1238

Warwick has 9 authors listed on the paper including our technicians who were instrumental in our construction of the P0D ECal detectors.

Thu 09 Jun 2011, 17:55 | Tags: Warwick, News, Publication