NOvA (link to NOvA subpage): is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. These neutrinos travelled 3.7 billion light-years to Earth: this means that they left the astrophysical source around about the same time as the Earth was formed! This groundbreaking discovery started the new era of neutrino astronomy!Īt Queen Mary, we work on different experiments to tackle these mysteries and more: Of the 24 neutrinos detected more than 1000 papers have been written! In 2018 the IceCube neutrino observatory detected the first neutrino flux coming from a blazar. Before 2018, the only detection of neutrinos from outside our galaxy occurred in 1987, when neutrinos emitted by a star going supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud arrived on Earth. Being able to travel extremely long distances completely undisturbed, neutrinos can bring us vital information from the most remote corners of the universe.

On top of holding the keys to some of the most interesting questions in science, neutrinos can also be used as a tool to explore the cosmos. Which neutrino mass state is the lightest?Īnswering the above questions will allow us to understand why the universe evolved to be dominated by matter rather than antimatter whether the four fundamental forces can be unified in a single manifestation of all of them and what roles Majorana particles play in nature.Do neutrinos and antineutrinos oscillate in the same way?.There are currently a few unanswered questions in the neutrino sector, which have major implications for our understanding of the laws of nature. The discovery of neutrino oscillations was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015. The neutrinos propagate in different mass states with different frequencies, the interference between them causing oscillations in the flavour components. This astonishing phenomenon is due to quantum mechanics: neutrinos are created or detected in flavour states, but these are superpositions of mass states. Neutrinos come in three flavour states (electron, muon and tau), and since the 1990s we have known that a neutrino can change flavour as it travels. They have a nearly negligible mass and they rarely interact, yet they are extremely abundant and have had a significant effect on the evolution of our universe. Neutrinos are the least understood of the currently known elementary particles.

Neutrino particle