Research Areas and Expertise | Experiment Nuclear and Astroparticle Physics

The pictures illustrating the double-beta decay. There are three neutrinos, presenting the status change after hit by double-beta.

Neutrino Properties

One of the most intriguing questions in physics today is, “Why is our universe matter dominated, and not antimatter dominated?” Neutrinos, although difficult to detect with their tiny masses, and no electrical charge, and oscillating flavors, could provide an insight. Fundamental particles are of two types, Majorana or Dirac. Dirac particles are distinct from their anti-particles, however if a particle is Majorana, it is the same as its own antiparticle. If the neutrino is Majorana, this would demonstrate that lepton number is not a conserved quantity, and provides a mechanism that explains the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. Furthermore, a Majorana neutrino would open the door to physics beyond the standard model.

This is a picture illustrating the concept of Beyond Standard Model

Beyond Standard Model (BSM)

A researcher is checking the underground facility

Doing Science Underground

We operate our experiments underground laboratories to reduce the impact of cosmic rays, muons, and other high-energy particles that naturally emanate from space. This is crucial for studying rare and elusive processes, such as neutrinoless double-beta decay, which has a half-life greater than 10^26 years. Such experiments require a very low background that is well modeled, and high detection efficiency and sensitivity. Cosmogenic activation leads to further backgrounds and thus requires our experiments to be built and operated underground.

This picture illustrates how the real-time data being collected, there are different experiment equipment connected by sensors and cables

Object-oriented Real-time Control and Acquisition – ORCA

ORCA is a data acquisition application for the MacOS X operating system. The goal is to provide a general purpose, highly modular, object-oriented, acquisition and control system that is easy to use, develop, and maintain. To this end, ORCA is written using the MacOS X Cocoa application framework development environment and Objective-C. Its general-purpose design enables a user to easily configure it at run-time to represent different hardware configurations and data read-out schemes.