DIRECTION 4 · PARTICLE PHYSICS
Particle Physics
Neutrino physics — oscillations and solar neutrinos, from Borexino’s solar program to JUNO’s oscillation measurements.
From Borexino to JUNO, the physics program follows the neutrinos themselves: solar neutrinos from the pp chain and the CNO cycle, and reactor antineutrinos whose oscillation pattern encodes the mixing parameters and the neutrino mass ordering.
Solar neutrinos are produced as hydrogen fuses into helium in the Sun’s core. The historic deficit between Davis’s measurement and Bahcall’s Standard Solar Model — about a third of the prediction — was eventually understood as neutrino flavour oscillation and the MSW matter effect.
JUNO — 20,000 tons of liquid scintillator with ~3% energy resolution at 1 MeV — measures the reactor ν̄ₑ survival probability precisely enough to attack the mass ordering, and reaches the CNO and ⁸B solar neutrinos. My contributions run from the BAMBI method behind Borexino’s CNO observation (improving the significance from 2σ to 5σ) to co-leading the statistical analysis of JUNO’s first oscillation-parameter measurement.
Other research directions