UTA to host international Project 8 neutrino conference

Friday, Oct 18, 2024

More than 40 scientists from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom will meet at The University of Texas at Arlington next week for a conference to discuss next steps in the Project 8 Experiment, which aims to measure the mass of elusive particles called neutrinos.

The conference will run Monday-Friday, Oct. 21-25, and will include two days of scientific workshops followed by three days of plenary sessions, and a special public colloquium by Project 8 collaborator Chen-Yu Liu, a professor of physics at Indiana University and member of the National Academy of Sciences, about advances in ultra-cold neutron physics.

Liu’s talk will be at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 23 in SEIR 198 and is open to all UTA students, faculty, staff, and the general public.

“It’s great to have UTA serve as host for this conference and I think it underscores what an important role UTA has in the Project 8 collaboration,” said Ben Jones, UTA associate professor of physics, a principal investigator of Project 8, and lead organizer of the conference. “It’s also wonderful to have a guest speaker of the caliber of Dr. Liu join us to talk about her influential and award-winning work.”

Project 8 includes faculty and students from UTA and 13 other universities and national laboratories in the U.S. and Europe. Its goal is to measure the absolute mass of neutrinos, which are fundamental particles and are extremely abundant in the universe but are hard to detect because they barely interact with ordinary matter. The neutrino is also extremely light, weighing at least one million times less than an electron, the next lightest particle.

Instead of trying to measure the neutrino’s mass directly, scientists use beta decay of tritium, in which tritium emits an electron and a neutrino, which must share the energy released in the decay. Using a method-based radio-frequency detection, the electron’s energy is measured precisely, and from this the missing energy is deduced as the neutrino’s mass.

The method being used for the tritium beta decay by Project 8 collaborators is a new method of electron spectroscopy called Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy (CRES). CRES is a way to measure the energy of an electron trapped in an externally applied magnetic field.

The weeklong conference at UTA will provide an opportunity for scientists to plan for the upcoming Low Frequency Apparatus, which is the imminent demonstrator phase of Project 8.

“UTA is playing a leading role in the development of atomic beam delivery systems for Project 8, using a combination of advanced optics and atomic physics techniques to test new methods of high flux lithium and tritium delivery to a stable and precisely mapped magnetic trap,” Jones said. “The electrons produced by beta decays of the cold, stored atoms will be monitored with CRES to infer the mass of the invisible neutrinos.”

UTA contributions to Project 8 are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Physics.

About Chen-Yu Liu

Liu, the James H. Rudy Professor of Physics at Indiana University, is recognized internationally for her work on neutron experiments. She has a leadership role in three collaborative projects which seek to answer some of the most pressing open questions about the neutron, a subatomic particle present in all atomic nuclei except those of ordinary hydrogen. She recently joined the Project 8 Experiment.

She develops novel experimental techniques to explain the neutron beta decay lifetime, neutron decay asymmetries, and other neutron-focused research. Much of her work involves ultra-cold neutrons, which have low kinetic energies and so can be stored in bottles or magnetic traps for up to a few minutes at a time, which is long enough to enable higher precision measurements.

Liu is also an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was named a National Academy of Sciences member in May 2024 for her pioneering contributions to nuclear physics. She earned her Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University in 2002 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2002-05.

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