UK Researchers Make New Discovery About Neutrinos, Bringing Us One Step Closer To Perhaps Solving One Of The Biggest Mysteries In Fundamental Physics
International research including the UK and Japan has confirmed that subatomic particles called neutrinos have a new form of identity-shifting property. Announced today (19 July 2013) these results could one day help scientists explain why the universe contains matter but very little antimatter.
Dr Alfons Weber, Professor of Physics at STFC and the University of Oxford is one of many scientists in the UK working on T2K – he designed the electronics for the experiment. He explains: “The UK particle physics community was one of the driving forces behind this experiment. We not only provided part of the detector that characterises the beam, but also designed the target that produces the neutrinos in the first place. The long years of hard work have now come to fruition.
“Our findings now open the possibility to study this process for neutrinos and their antimatter partners, the anti-neutrinos. A difference in the rate of electron or anti-electron neutrino being produced may lead us to understand why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe. The neutrino may be the very reason we are here.”
Full Story: http://www.stfc.ac.uk/2802.aspx
