Posts Tagged Kevin McFarland

Led by researchers from the University of Rochester, scientists from the international collaboration MINERvA have, for the first time, used a beam of hard-to-detect neutrinos to investigate the structure of protons.

Experiments conducted in a mine in Japan may hold clues to explain why the matter than makes up the universe escaped annihilation by anti-matter during the Big Bang.

When the highly anticipated findings from the Japan-based T2K neutrino experiment were finally presented at the International Conference on High Energy Physics this month, it was Rochester graduate student Konosuke (Ko) Iwamoto who updated the physics world on the puzzle behind the imbalance between matter and antimatter.

A team led by professors Steven Manly and Kevin McFarland was honored “for the fundamental discovery of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics.”

In what they call a “weird little corner” of the already weird world of neutrinos, physicists have found evidence that these tiny particles might be involved in a surprising reaction. In an experiment conducted with the international MINERvA collaboration at Fermilab, physics professor Kevin McFarland and his students and colleagues provide evidence that neutrinos can sometimes interact with a nucleus but leave it basically untouched, resulting in a new particle being created out of a vacuum.

The new finding could help explore a fundamental question of science – why is the universe made up almost exclusively of matter, when matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts in the Big Bang?