Neutrino Physics Research

Neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the universe, yet they interact so weakly with ordinary matter that detecting and characterizing them demands extraordinary experimental ingenuity. A central discovery of recent decades is that neutrinos oscillate — spontaneously changing between electron, muon, and tau "flavors" as they travel — a phenomenon confirmed by experiments such as the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, KamLAND, and Daya Bay using solar, atmospheric, and reactor sources. This behavior implies that neutrinos have small but nonzero masses, a fact not accommodated by the original Standard Model of particle physics and one that raises pressing questions about the absolute mass scale and whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles, which searches for neutrinoless double-beta decay aim to resolve. Active directions include hunting for hypothetical sterile neutrinos that mix with the known flavors, refining how neutrino flavor transformation proceeds inside collapsing stars, and pinning down the precise mass ordering that governs how neutrinos propagate through matter.

Works

88,627

Total citations

763,829

Keywords

Neutrino Flavor TransformationNeutrino OscillationsDouble-Beta DecaySupernova SimulationsSterile NeutrinosSolar Neutrinos