As part of the international T2K collaboration team led by Japan, researchers from the T2K group at CU Boulder 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 Boulder 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 pdf version of the paper outlining this discovery is available on the T2K English Web site.