#NEUTRINO MEANING HOW TO#

You can’t help but feel inspired walking the same hallways as legendary physicists like C.S. It’s not unusual to find a CERN phone book from the 1990s in a desk drawer, or film from 1970s bubble chamber experiments in a cabinet. To walk into the lab is to be transported back to the Golden Age of particle physics in the 1950s and 60s. What’s that like and what does a typical day look like? You work at Nevis Laboratories, a short commute from Morningside Heights. Any advice for women considering a career in physics?ĭo it. Like science itself, it’s there to teach us new things about our world. It’s always changing and reinventing itself.

The sense of community, the freedom to be creative with the direction I take in my research, and the environment: New York City is a dynamic place. What made you come back to Columbia after finishing your postdoc and part of your PhD here?

It can take more than a decade from the design of a neutrino experiment to making an actual discovery. So, to study them we need extremely intense neutrino beams and massive detectors running for many years, so as to collect data with enough interactions to make statistically meaningful conclusions. A neutrino has a good chance of traveling through 200 Earths before interacting at all. Neutrinos barely interact with other matter. What’s the hardest part about doing this research? If we can confirm this anomalous signal we may discover other neutrino states or properties that suggest the existence of a new class of particles or forces in nature. MicroBooNE has two goals: to advance a novel detector technology, and to follow up on a long-standing anomalous signal observed by its predecessor experiment, MiniBooNE. They’re elusive and hard to study, and we still have a lot of questions to answer about their properties. Neutrinos could hold the key to fundamental questions like why our universe is dominated by matter rather than antimatter. There’s a reason why I’ve spent most of my career studying neutrinos. We built a rotating set of plywood pockets to measure muon flux as a function of azimuthal angle, and dragged our contraption up and down the fire escape of the tallest building at Florida Tech to measure how many muons were absorbed as a function of number of ceilings above us. I spent the summer with a friend formulating questions about cosmic ray muons and augmenting our telescope to answer them. I knew this was the field for me when, as an undergraduate, I built a cosmic ray muon telescope from parts found in a storage closet. There’s no single way to find the right answer, but you do have to make sure it’s right.

#NEUTRINO MEANING HOW TO#

You start by carefully formulating a question, figuring out how to answer it, finding the answer (which can take years), and then proving you’re right. Karagiorgi: It’s creative problem solving at its best.

By detecting those trails, we can usually infer the presence of a neutrino, its identity, and how fast and in what direction it’s traveling. Each charged particle leaves behind a trail of scintillation light and ionization electrons produced by excited atoms along the charged particle's path. The explosion that follows usually produces a spray of charged particles-electrons, muons, and/or protons. Neutrinos traverse our detectors without leaving a trail, but every now and then they collide head-on with an atomic nucleus. An extension to the Standard Model now accommodates neutrino oscillation, but sterile neutrinos would be one more challenge. If neutrinos have no mass, as the Standard Model prescribes, they shouldn’t be able to oscillate. However, it can’t explain our observations of dark matter in space or neutrinos morphing from one state to another. It has withstood the test of hundreds of experiments and measurements. Since the 1960s, this theoretical framework has been amazingly predictive. Particles are organized by their properties-like intrinsic spin, mass, and electric charge-which allows us to understand their underlying dynamics and how they interact with each other. Like the periodic table in chemistry, it’s a catalog of all known fundamental particles that make up matter. What’s the Standard Model of particle physics and where do neutrinos fit in?

Neutrino meaning