Candidate of muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillation
Welcome to the home page of the group of exotic matter and neutrino physics
Open questions in particle physics
The last decades have seen remarkable progress in our understanding of the Universe. A wealth of results in particle physics and astrophysics have clarified the landscape at the various frontiers. In this rapidly emerging picture of the Standard Model of Elementary Particles, Nature seems to have unveiled many of its fundamental secrets.
Yet there remain open questions not satisfactorily accomodated within the present Standard Model of Elementary Particles:
What are the properties of the neutrino, one of the most abundant particle in the Universe?
Why is the Universe dominated by matter ?
Is the proton stable or does it decay as predicted by Grand Unified Theories ?
Is there a new non-baryonic elementary particle responsible for the astrophysical evidence for Dark Matter ?
Is there a Dark Sector ?
Do we understand the gravity of anti-matter ?
These areas are where new discoveries might happen. Very likely new physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) is a key ingredient to resolve these questions.
Our mission
Address fundamental questions in elementary particle physics and astro-particle physics
What are the flavor oscillation properties of neutrinos ?
Is there CP-violation in the leptonic sector ?
Is the proton unstable?
Detecting astrophysical neutrinos, what do they tell us about distant phenomena in the Universe ?
The T2K experiment has started data taking using the enhanced neutrino beam and new neutrino near-detectors. The stable operation of neutrino beam has been successfully achieved at a record high beam intensity (about 710 kW). The new neutrino detectors that can measure neutrino interactions with even higher precision than before. The newly installed detectors consist of SuperFGD and a High-Angle TPC. The ETHZ group has played a major roles in these activitities.
Dr. Paolo Crivelli, a Senior Scientist in the group since several years, was promoted with the title of Adjoint Professor. Paolo Crivelli is an internationally acclaimed specialist in exotic atoms and dark matter. He investigates these by means of high-precision experiments. He was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for his research. We congratulate!!!
The origin of the violation of parity symmetry in weak interactions is still a great mystery. Could there be a Mirror world of ours such that overall parity is conserved in Nature? Using our unique positron infrastructure at ETHZ to create positronium, we have searched for its disappearance into its Mirror state. With extremely high sensitivity, we could exclude this process by an order of magnitude compared to previously existing studies. The search for Mirror Matter has been pushed further!
T2K published a new measurement of the differential cross sections of muon neutrino charged-current interactions on carbon with a single positively charged pion. While agreement with the models is generally good, data shows a significant discrepancy in the so-called low Q2 region.
