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).
| Name | Position | Contact details | Location | Photo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Academic staff | ||||
| Peter Clarke | Professor | peter.clarke [at] ed.ac.uk | JCMB 3421 |  |
| Franz Muheim | Professor | f.muheim [at] ed.ac.uk | JCMB 3410 |  |
| Matthew Needham | Professor | matthew.needham [at] ed.ac.uk | JCMB 3401 | |
| Cheryl Patrick | STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow | cpatrick [at] ed.ac.uk | JCMB 3405 | |
| Andrzej Szelc | Chair of Experimental Neutrino Physics | a.szelc [at] ed.ac.uk | JCMB 3413 | |
| Research staff | ||||
| Xalbat Aguerre | Postdoctoral Research Associate - SuperNEMO | xaguerre [at] ed.ac.uk | JCMB 4310 | |
| Deb Sankar Bhattacharya | BUTTON PDRA | dbhatta2 [at] ed.ac.uk | JCMB 3420 | |
| Emma Ellingwood | DarkSide/Button Postdoctoral Research Associate | emma.ellingwood [at] ed.ac.uk | JCMB | |
| Miquel Nebot-Guinot | PDRA | miquel.nebot [at] ed.ac.uk | JCMB 3402 | |
| Gabriela Vitti Stenico | DUNE Postdoctoral Research Associate | gvittis [at] ed.ac.uk | JCMB 3402 | |
| Research postgraduates | ||||
| Lucy Kotsiopoulou | PhD Student | L.Kotsiopoulou [at] sms.ed.ac.uk | JCMB 3305 | |
| Penghui Li | Postgraduate Student | s1724346 [at] sms.ed.ac.uk | JCMB 3305 | |
| Holly Parkinson | Postgraduate Student | h.b.parkinson [at] sms.ed.ac.uk | JCMB 5302 | |
| Samuel Pratt | Postgraduate Student | S.Pratt-4 [at] sms.ed.ac.uk | JCMB | |
| Gillian Turnbull | Postgraduate Student | G.Turnbull-8 [at] sms.ed.ac.uk | JCMB 3305 | |