ENGINEERS from Warrington’s STFC Daresbury Laboratory have played a key role in a ground-breaking experiment in Japan to study neutrinos – fundamental particles among the least understood in the Universe.
They have worked with university partners to lead the design and construction of some of the vital hardware needed for the T2K neutrino experiment.
There were celebrations when the experiment detected its first neutrinos.
T2K – Tokai-to-Kamioka – is an international experiment led by Japan and part-funded by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council.
It probes the strange properties of the enigmatic neutrino to unprecedented precision, by firing the most intense neutrino beam ever designed from the east coast of Japan, all the way under the country, to a detector near Japan’s west coast.
Neutrino oscillations are one of the frontiers of current particle physics and the T2K project and represent a further step towards understanding the role of the neutrino in the early Universe.
They may even shed light on the mystery of why there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe.
Professor Dave Wark of Imperial College London and the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the international co-spokesperson of T2K, said: “It was extremely satisfying to see the first events in the detector. It has been the result of a lot of hard work by a large number of people.
Among the international team of around 500 physicists from 12 countries, UK scientists have made a significant contribution to the experiment. With nine UK institutions involved, the UK has produced vital hardware for both the accelerator and detectors. The UK is also playing a leading role in the analysis software for the experiment and will be fully involved in the most exciting bit – using the data to explore the properties of neutrinos. This is expected to begin in January when the experiment is scheduled to begin production running.
“Within a year T2K should have sensitivity to neutrino properties beyond any existing experiment, and the search for the unknown will begin,” said Professor Wark.
Pictures: Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institute for Cosmic Ray Research), The University of Tokyo
4 Comments
Get your facts right. Daresbury is in Halton, not Warrington. This small discretion spoils an otherwise interesting and well written story.
It has a WA4 postcode and an 01925 telephone number and on their website STFC state quite clearly that Daresbury Laboratory is in Warrington and not Halton. Why does that not class it as Warrington then????
I think you need to ask your friends at Daresbury why they would rather be associated with Warrington instead of Halton!
It is good to know that the North West has a wealth of intellectual knowledge and expertise to share with the global scientific community and projects.