A neutrino is a fermion that interacts only via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass is so small (-ino) that it was long thought to be zero. The rest mass of the neutrino is much smaller than that of the other known elementary particles. The weak force has a very short range, the gravitational interaction is extremely weak due to the very small mass of the neutrino, and neutrinos do not participate in the electromagnetic interaction or the strong interaction. Thus, neutrinos typically pass through normal matter unimpeded and undetected.
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) was a neutrino observatory located 2100 m underground in Vale's Creighton Mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. The detector was designed to detect solar neutrinos through their interactions with a large tank of heavy water.
Super-Kamiokande is a neutrino observatory located under Mount Ikeno near the city of Hida, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. It is operated by the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo with the help of an international team. It is located 1,000 m (3,300 ft) underground in the Mozumi Mine in Hida's Kamioka area. The observatory was designed to detect high-energy neutrinos, to search for proton decay, study solar and atmospheric neutrinos, and keep watch for supernovae in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Gargamelle was a heavy liquid bubble chamber detector in operation at CERN between 1970 and 1979. It was designed to detect neutrinos and antineutrinos, which were produced with a beam from the Proton Synchrotron (PS) between 1970 and 1976, before the detector was moved to the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). In 1979 an irreparable crack was discovered in the bubble chamber, and the detector was decommissioned. It is currently part of the "Microcosm" exhibition at CERN, open to the public.
The High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, known as KEK, is a Japanese organization whose purpose is to operate the largest particle physics laboratory in Japan, situated in Tsukuba, Ibaraki prefecture. It was established in 1997. The term "KEK" is also used to refer to the laboratory itself, which employs approximately 695 employees. KEK's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics, material science, structural biology, radiation science, computing science, nuclear transmutation and so on. Numerous experiments have been constructed at KEK by the internal and international collaborations that have made use of them. Makoto Kobayashi, emeritus professor at KEK, is known globally for his work on CP-violation, and was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics.
A neutrino detector is a physics apparatus which is designed to study neutrinos. Because neutrinos only weakly interact with other particles of matter, neutrino detectors must be very large to detect a significant number of neutrinos. Neutrino detectors are often built underground, to isolate the detector from cosmic rays and other background radiation. The field of neutrino astronomy is still very much in its infancy – the only confirmed extraterrestrial sources as of 2018 are the Sun and the supernova 1987A in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. Another likely source is the blazar TXS 0506+056 about 3.7 billion light years away. Neutrino observatories will "give astronomers fresh eyes with which to study the universe".
T2K is a particle physics experiment studying the oscillations of the accelerator neutrinos. The experiment is conducted in Japan by the international cooperation of about 500 physicists and engineers with over 60 research institutions from several countries from Europe, Asia and North America and it is a recognized CERN experiment (RE13). T2K collected data within its first phase of operation from 2010 till 2021. The second phase of data taking is expected to start in 2023 and last until commencement of the successor of T2K – the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment in 2027.
The Kamioka Observatory, Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo is a neutrino and gravitational waves laboratory located underground in the Mozumi mine of the Kamioka Mining and Smelting Co. near the Kamioka section of the city of Hida in Gifu Prefecture, Japan. A set of groundbreaking neutrino experiments have taken place at the observatory over the past two decades. All of the experiments have been very large and have contributed substantially to the advancement of particle physics, in particular to the study of neutrino astronomy and neutrino oscillation.
The NOνA experiment is a particle physics experiment designed to detect neutrinos in Fermilab's NuMI beam. Intended to be the successor to MINOS, NOνA consists of two detectors, one at Fermilab, and one in northern Minnesota. Neutrinos from NuMI pass through 810 km of Earth to reach the far detector. NOνA's main goal is to observe the oscillation of muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos. The primary physics goals of NOvA are:
SNO+ is a physics experiment designed to search for neutrinoless double beta decay, with secondary measurements of proton–electron–proton (pep) solar neutrinos, geoneutrinos from radioactive decays in the Earth, and reactor neutrinos. It is under construction using the underground equipment already installed for the former Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) experiment at SNOLAB. It could also observe supernovae neutrinos if a supernova occurs in our galaxy.
J-PARC is a high intensity proton accelerator facility. It is a joint project between KEK and JAEA and is located at the Tokai campus of JAEA. J-PARC aims for the frontier in materials and life sciences, and nuclear and particle physics. J-PARC uses high intensity proton beams to create high intensity secondary beams of neutrons, hadrons, and neutrinos.
The K2K experiment was a neutrino experiment that ran from June 1999 to November 2004. It used muon neutrinos from a well-controlled and well-understood beam to verify the oscillations previously observed by Super-Kamiokande using atmospheric neutrinos. This was the first positive measurement of neutrino oscillations in which both the source and detector were fully under experimenters' control. Previous experiments relied on neutrinos from the Sun or from cosmic sources. The experiment found oscillation parameters which were consistent with those measured by Super-Kamiokande.
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a neutrino experiment under construction, with a near detector at Fermilab and a far detector at the Sanford Underground Research Facility that will observe neutrinos produced at Fermilab. An intense beam of trillions of neutrinos from the production facility at Fermilab will be sent over a distance of 1,300 kilometers (810 mi) with the goal of understanding the role of neutrinos in the universe. More than 1,000 collaborators work on the project. The experiment is designed for a 20-year period of data collection.
The Accelerator Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE) is a proposed water Cherenkov detector experiment designed to examine the nature of neutrino interactions. This experiment will study phenomena like proton decay, and neutrino oscillations, by analyzing neutrino interactions in gadolinium-loaded water and measuring their neutron yield. Neutron Tagging plays an important role in background rejection from atmospheric neutrinos. By implementing early prototypes of LAPPDs, high precision timing is possible. The suggested location for ANNIE is the SciBooNE hall on the Booster Neutrino Beam associated with the MiniBooNE experiment. The neutrino beam originates in Fermilab where The Booster delivers 8 GeV protons to a beryllium target producing secondary pions and kaons. These secondary mesons decay to produce a neutrino beam with an average energy of around 800 MeV. ANNIE will begin installation in the summer of 2015. Phase I of ANNIE, mapping the neutron background, completed in 2017. The detector is being upgraded for full science operation which is expected to begin late 2018.
The diffuse supernova neutrino background(DSNB) is a theoretical population of neutrinos (and anti-neutrinos) cumulatively originating from all core-collapse supernovae events throughout the history of the universe. Though it has not yet been directly detected, the DSNB is theorized to be isotropic and consists of neutrinos with typical energies on the scale of 107 eV. Current detection efforts are limited by the influence of background noise in the search for DSNB neutrinos and are therefore limited to placing limits on the parameters of the DSNB, namely the neutrino flux. Restrictions on these parameters have gotten more strict in recent years, but many researchers are looking to make direct observations in the near future with next generation detectors. The DSNB is not to be confused with the cosmic neutrino background (CNB), which is comprised by relic neutrinos that were produced during the Big Bang and have much lower energies (10−4 to 10−6 eV).
Kōichirō Nishikawa was a Japanese elementary particle physicist, known for contributions to neutrino physics. He was professor emeritus of the KEK high-energy physics laboratory and Kyōto University.
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The Enhanced NeUtrino BEams from kaon Tagging or ENUBET is an ERC funded project that aims at producing an artificial neutrino beam in which the flavor, flux and energy of the produced neutrinos are known with unprecedented precision.
An accelerator neutrino is a human-generated neutrino or antineutrino obtained using particle accelerators, in which beam of protons is accelerated and collided with a fixed target, producing mesons which then decay into neutrinos. Depending on the energy of the accelerated protons and whether mesons decay in flight or at rest it is possible to generate neutrinos of a different flavour, energy and angular distribution. Accelerator neutrinos are used to study neutrino interactions and neutrino oscillations taking advantage of high intensity of neutrino beams, as well as a possibility to control and understand their type and kinematic properties to a much greater extent than for neutrinos from other sources.
Supernova neutrinos are weakly interactive elementary particles produced during a core-collapse supernova explosion. A massive star collapses at the end of its life, emitting on the order of 1058 neutrinos and antineutrinos in all lepton flavors. The luminosity of different neutrino and antineutrino species are roughly the same. They carry away about 99% of the gravitational energy of the dying star as a burst lasting tens of seconds. The typical supernova neutrino energies are 10 to 20 MeV. Supernovae are considered the strongest and most frequent source of cosmic neutrinos in the MeV energy range.
