Neutrinos

The observation of neutrino oscillations both solved the solar neutrino puzzle and opened up the possibility of CP violation in the neutrino sector. This will be searched for by the next generation of neutrino experiments in the coming decay which will also study proton decay and astrophysical neutrinos.

Mysterious neutrinos are the only particles in the universe that have been observed to behave in ways that go beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. Tiny, electrically neutral, and almost invisible; neutrinos oscillate between three “flavours” as they travel. This means that, contrary to the Standard Model’s predictions, they must have mass, with the mass states a quantum mixture of flavour states. The Nobel Prize-winning discovery of these oscillations was hugely exciting, and has opened up a host of intriguing questions - what are the neutrinos’ masses, and how do they mix? How do neutrinos get their mass? Could there be additional, “sterile” neutrinos? And could the behaviours of neutrinos and their antiparticles give us some clue to how we live in a universe made of matter, rather than antimatter?

Here at Edinburgh, the neutrino group works on several experiments. DUNE, MicroBooNE and SBND use liquid-argon detectors to study neutrino oscillations. SuperNEMO seeks the proposed, but never observed, matter-creating process of neutrinoless double-beta decay. e4nu uses electron-scattering data to help understand neutrino-nucleus interaction models. Finally, the WATCHMAN project studies how neutrinos produced in nuclear reactors can be used to monitor nuclear non-proliferation.
 

 Read more about our research interests and the experiments we work on.

PhD project opportunities in Neutrinos

People in Neutrinos

Telephone numbers in the list below are shown as UK numbers. Callers from outside the UK should remove the leading zero and use the UK country code (+44).

NamePositionContact detailsLocationPhoto
Academic staff
Peter ClarkeProfessor
JCMB
3421
Photo of Peter Clarke
Franz MuheimProfessor
JCMB
3410
Photo of Franz Muheim
Matthew NeedhamReader
JCMB
3401
Cheryl PatrickSTFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow
JCMB
3405
Andrzej SzelcRoyal Society University Research Fellow
JCMB
3414
Research staff
Xalbat AguerrePostdoctoral Research Associate - SuperNEMO
JCMB
Deb Sankar BhattacharyaBUTTON PDRA
JCMB
3416
Marina GuzzoSBN Postdoctoral Research Associate
JCMB
3402
Miquel Nebot-GuinotPDRA
JCMB
3402
Gabriela Vitti StenicoDUNE Postdoctoral Research Associate
JCMB
3420
Ben WynnePostdoctoral Research Associate
JCMB
3416
Photo of Ben Wynne
Research postgraduates
Lucy KotsiopoulouPhD Student
JCMB
3305
Jiaoyang LiPostgraduate Student
JCMB
3305
Penghui LiPostgraduate Student
JCMB
3305
Holly ParkinsonPostgraduate Student
JCMB
3305
Samuel PrattPostgraduate Student
JCMB
Gillian TurnbullPostgraduate Student
JCMB
3305