A neutrino is a fermion that interacts only via the weak subatomic force and gravity. The mass of the neutrino is much smaller than that of the other known elementary particles. Although only differences of squares of the three mass values are known as of 2016, cosmological observations imply that the sum of the three masses must be less than one millionth that of the electron. 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 weak force has a very short range, the gravitational interaction is extremely weak, and neutrinos, as leptons, do not participate in the strong interaction. Thus, neutrinos typically pass through normal matter unimpeded and undetected.
The BaBar experiment, or simply BaBar, is an international collaboration of more than 500 physicists and engineers studying the subatomic world at energies of approximately ten times the rest mass of a proton (~10 GeV). Its design was motivated by the investigation of Charge Parity violation. BaBar is located at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which is operated by Stanford University for the Department of Energy in California.
In experimental and applied particle physics, nuclear physics, and nuclear engineering, a particle detector, also known as a radiation detector, is a device used to detect, track, and/or identify ionizing particles, such as those produced by nuclear decay, cosmic radiation, or reactions in a particle accelerator. Detectors can measure the particle energy and other attributes such as momentum, spin, charge, particle type, in addition to merely registering the presence of the particle.
The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, in Dubna, Moscow Oblast, Russia, is an international research center for nuclear sciences, with 5500 staff members, 1200 researchers including 1000 Ph.Ds from eighteen member states. Most scientists, however, are eminent Russian scientists.
The Kamioka Liquid Scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) is an electron antineutrino detector at the Kamioka Observatory, an underground neutrino detection facility near Toyama, Japan. The device is situated in a drift mine shaft in the old KamiokaNDE cavity in the Japanese Alps. The site is surrounded by 53 Japanese commercial nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors produce electron antineutrinos (
) during the decay of radioactive fission products in the nuclear fuel. Like the intensity of light from a light bulb or a distant star, the isotropically-emitted
flux decreases at 1/R2 per increasing distance R from the reactor. The device is sensitive up to an estimated 25% of antineutrinos from nuclear reactors that exceed the threshold energy of 1.8 megaelectronvolts (MeV) and thus produces a signal in the detector.
Maria Spiropulu is an experimental physicist at the California Institute of Technology. She is a member of the CMS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider where the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012.
Inverse beta decay, commonly abbreviated to IBD, is a nuclear reaction involving electron antineutrino scattering off a proton, creating a positron and a neutron. This process is commonly used in the detection of electron antineutrinos in neutrino detectors, such as the first detection of antineutrinos in the Cowan–Reines neutrino experiment, or in neutrino experiments such as KamLAND and Borexino. It is an essential process to experiments involving low energy neutrinos such as those studying neutrino oscillation, reactor neutrinos, sterile neutrinos, and geoneutrinos. The IBD reaction can only be used to detect antineutrinos due to lepton conservation.
In particle physics, a B-factory, or sometimes a beauty factory, is a particle collider experiment designed to produce and detect a large number of B mesons so that their properties and behaviour can be measured with small statistical uncertainty. Tauons and D mesons are also copiously produced at B-factories,
In particle physics, tracking is the process of reconstructing the trajectory of electrically charged particles in a particle detector known as a tracker. The particles entering such a tracker leave a precise record of their passage through the device, by interaction with suitably constructed components and materials. The presence of a calibrated magnetic field, in all or part of the tracker, allows the local momentum of the charged particle to be directly determined from the reconstructed local curvature of the trajectory for known electric charge of the particle.
INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1970s.
Prof. Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee,, is an experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) with a few other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' of the project. CMS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1991 and now has over 3500 participants from 45 countries.
A geoneutrino is a neutrino or antineutrino emitted in decay of radionuclide naturally occurring in the Earth. Neutrinos, the lightest of the known subatomic particles, lack measurable electromagnetic properties and interact only via the weak nuclear force when ignoring gravity. Matter is virtually transparent to neutrinos and consequently they travel, unimpeded, at near light speed through the Earth from their point of emission. Collectively, geoneutrinos carry integrated information about the abundances of their radioactive sources inside the Earth. A major objective of the emerging field of neutrino geophysics involves extracting geologically useful information from geoneutrino measurements.
Kam-Biu Luk is a professor of physics, with a focus on particle physics, at UC Berkeley and a senior faculty member in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's physics division. Luk has conducted research on neutrino oscillation and CP violation. Luk and his collaborator Yifang Wang were awarded the 2014 Panofsky Prize “for their leadership of the Daya Bay experiment, which produced the first definitive measurement of θ13 angle of the neutrino mixing matrix.” His work on neutrino oscillation also received 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics shared with other teams. Luk is a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Mohammad Sajjad "Saj" Alam is an American physicist born in British India. His work has focused on particle physics and computational physics. He has played a significant role in several major particle physics experiments that have led to new discoveries in the area of high-energy particle physics.
Wang Yifang is a Chinese elementary particle and accelerator physicist. He is director of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and known for contributions to neutrino physics, in particular his leading role at Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment to determine the last unknown neutrino mixing angle θ 13.
James E. Brau is an American physicist at the University of Oregon (UO) who conducts research on elementary particles and fields. He founded the Oregon experimental high energy physics group in 1988 and served as director of the UO Center for High Energy Physics from 1997–2016. Prior to joining the Oregon faculty, he served in the Air Force and held positions at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the University of Tennessee. He is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and also the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2006 he was appointed the Philip H. Knight Professor of Natural Science, an endowed professorship.
John "Jack" Francis Gunion is an American physicist, specializing in theoretical high energy physics.
Michel Della Negra, born 1942, is a French experimental particle physicist known for his role in the 2012 discovery of the Higgs Boson.
Atsuto Suzuki is an experimental particle physicist known for his observations of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos.
