Our group is committed to spreading knowledge about neutrinos, the infinitesimally small yet extremely fascinating particles.
Science outreach, in particular at CERN, has done an outstanding job of making everyone aware of the most interesting discovery of our millennium: the Higgs Boson. Most people today are familiar with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), or at least know that it exists in the form of a very long underground tunnel between France and Switzerland. In fact, hadron physics was, rightfully, the major protagonist of our scientific era and it has become known to the general public.
However, the discovery of neutrino oscillations in 1999, and the Nobel Prize awarded for it in 2015, made it clear that these light leptons1 want their part in the scene too.
We are on the verge of incredibly interesting new measurements and discoveries. In the next 10-15 years we will achieve high precision on the measurement of the parameters describing neutrino oscillations, we will solve the question about the neutrino mass hierarchy, while hoping to understand definitively if there is a fourth neutrino, that we would call sterile. Maybe even more exciting, we are about to precisely measure the CP-violating phase, which is the key to understand why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. Many experiments are currently running or being built to achieve these goals, among them the ones the EP-NU group is involved in: DUNE, T2K, ICARUS, SND@LHC. We in EP-NU are more dedicated to the data analysis, there is a strict cooperation with the Neutrino Platform, the place at CERN where the hardware for these experiments is being either built or tested. While our offices might not be very interesting, the Neutrino Platform is open for the public to visit, as one of the people’s favorite CERN Visit Points. You can try to book a visit following and selecting the Neutrino Platform among the options. However, keep in mind that demand is high and the number of visitors is limited.
The prototype of the DUNE detector located at the Neutrino Platform on the Swiss/French border near Geneva
In addition to this day-to-day outreach, we are also trying to have a media presence in the CERN channels; our goal is both to make people curious about these field, which is still unknown to most, and to attract scientists to join us in our research, which we truly deem extremely relevant. You can find the latest article presenting what is going on in these months regarding neutrinos in the main website of CERN. We also recommend the YouTube live we broadcast in May ‘23 - Particle Pursuit - A Journey of the DUNE Experiment, where we talked about DUNE together with our coleagues from Fermilab and the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). Totally worth watching and suitable for general public!
To conclude, it’s worth stressing out one last time that fully understanding neutrinos will undoubtedly be one of the most important scientific achievements of the next decades, contributing to the understanding of the universe and of the fundamental laws of nature.
New discoveries and measurements will be crucial also for all other fields of physics, from cosmology to particle physics, from astrophysics to nuclear physics.
There is a lot of work to be done, and we welcome all the help we can get!
Leptons are one of the families of elementary particles in the Standard Model. ↩
