The 2016 Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics was awarded November 8, 2015 for the discovery and study of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond the standard model of high energy particle physics. The $3M Prize is shared among the all of the scientific collaborators including CU-Physics Professors Eric D. Zimmerman and Alysia Marino, as well as CU postdoctoral researchers Robert Johnson and Stephen Coleman, and graduate students Scott Johnson, Andrew Missert, and Tianlu Yuan.

Neutrinos are the most elusive of all of the fundamental particles that make up the universe. They are produced in many nuclear reactions. Since they interact so weakly with other matter, they can travel all the way through the sun or the earth. Because of this, very large underground detectors have been built to catch and study these elusive particles. The CU team works at T2K in Japan, which generates an intense beam of muon neutrinos on the east coast of Japan using a device built at CU, and shoots them through the earth aimed at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector deep inside a mountain 180 miles away on the other side of Japan. Professor Marino was also a team member in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), one of the other collaborations cited in the prize. The Breakthrough Prize was awarded for the observation that muon neutrinos can oscillate into electron neutrinos by the time they reach the detector.

The Breakthrough Prize ceremony was broadcast live from the NASA Ames Research Center in California on Sunday. A one-hour version of the broadcast is scheduled for November 29. The Breakthrough Prizes were established in 2012 to recognize achievements in three fields:
Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences and Mathematics. Laureates receive $3 million each in prizemoney, making the Breakthrough Prizes the largest scientific awards in the world.

Off

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Alysia Marino for being named by President Obama as a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The announcement was delivered on Monday, September 27th.

Marino was honored for her accomplishments in the study of neutrino properties and the development of diagnostic tools that may be used to help design future neutrino beam facilities, as well as for her outstanding mentoring of graduate students. The PECASE award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers who are early in their independent research careers.

<>

Off

As part of the international T2K collaboration team led by Japan, researchers from the T2K group at CU Βι¶ΉΣ°ΤΊ have discovered indications of a new type of neutrino oscillation in an experiment in Japan. The announcement was delivered by the international T2K collaboration on Wednesday, June 15, 2011.

The T2K group at CU Βι¶ΉΣ°ΤΊ consists of Professors Alysia Marino and Eric Zimmerman, as well as several post docs, including Robert Johnson, Stephen Coleman and grad students, including Tianlu Yuan and Andrew Missert. The T2K group often utilizes post docs, grad students and undergrad students to help conduct research in the field of high energy physics.

Using a beam of muon neutrinos that travel 295 km across Japan, researchers at the T2K collaboration have observed that muon neutrinos appear to turn into electron neutrinos. Researchers expected to see 1.5 electron neutrino-like events in a giant Super-Kamiokande Detector, but observed 6 events.

The T2K, or Tokai to Kamioka experiment, is the product of collaboration between researchers in Japan and around the world. The experiment included shooting a beam of neutrinos underground from the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, or J-PARC, on the country's east coast to a detector near Japan's west coast, a distance of about 185 miles.

A  version of the paper outlining this discovery is available on the .

<>

<>

Off