Neutrinos at UChicagoOur Research

Our research focuses on exploring the properties of neutrinos, the lightest and most abundant matter particles in the Standard Model. The discovery of neutrino oscillations (2015 Nobel Prize in Physics), indicating they are massive particles that ‘mix’ together, has been one of the most important discoveries in particle physics of the past few decades. This phenomenon of neutrino oscillations now provides an exciting opportunity to further explore fundamental questions in particle physics. Do neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently (known as CP symmetry violation) in a way that could help us understand why the universe we inhabit has become dominated by matter instead of antimatter? Do additional non-active ‘sterile’ neutrinos exist, indicating a previously unknown sector of fundamental particles?

An important experimental technique in neutrino research involves creating intense beams of neutrinos at particle accelerator facilities and aiming them at detectors over both short (hundreds of meters) and long (hundreds of kilometers) distances. Our current research involves on-going and future neutrino experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory one hour west of the University campus.

At short-baseline, the MicroBooNE experiment is an 86 ton liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) and is the largest detector of its kind used for neutrino physics operating in the US. Our group is also leading the construction of the new Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) to greatly enhance the reach of the short-baseline program in searching for evidence of sterile neutrinos.

These short-baseline experiments, going on now, serve as important next steps toward our goal of realizing massive multi-kiloton-scale LArTPC detectors in the next decade to do long-baseline oscillation physics and search for CP violation among the neutrinos.

See the Projects page for more information on all of our experiments.