Neutrino oscillations
After working on my thesis, which versed on the study of the composition of cosmic rays of ultra-high energy, I changed topics to neutrino oscillations. Neutrinos are truly fascinating particles! They are at least one million times lighter than electrons and are able to pass through light-years of matter undisturbed. While you are reading this, billions of neutrinos, mostly coming from the sun, will traverse every square centimetre of your body each second unnoticed.
Neutrinos are produced in one of three types, or “flavours,” called electron, muon and tau. However, neutrinos can change their flavour, “oscillating” back and forth among the three types as they move through space. Almost like throwing an orange to the air and picking up a pear when it falls back on your hand. This is possible in the weird quantum world of physics because neutrinos of well-defined flavour do not have a well-defined mass; it takes a mixture of masses to make a neutrino with a well-defined flavour and vice versa. This mixing of masses and flavours is what allows neutrinos to shape-shift as they travel through space.
Both the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics and the 2016 Breakthrough Prize were awarded for the discovery and study of neutrino oscillations. But many critical questions remain unanswered. In particular, we believe that understanding the differences between the oscillation of neutrinos and antineutrinos could help solving the mystery of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe.
To answer this question and others, the neutrino group at the University of Granada is part of the SBND and DUNE collaborations. They are both based in the technology of liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs), and will make extensive use of state-of-the-art analysis techniques, including machine learning and deep learning. If you want to know more about what are we trying to measure and how a neutrino experiment works, you can have a look at my slides on the neutrino mass hierarchy measurement or my latest seminar on the NOvA experiment.