Cindy Regal, a University of Colorado assistant professor of physics and associate fellow of JILA, has been awarded the prestigious David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation established the fellowship “to allow the nation’s most promising professors to pursue science and engineering research early in their careers with few funding restrictions and limited paperwork requirements.” This year, sixteen fellows were selected from 100 applicants across leading 50 universities.
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.
Congratulations to Assistant Professor Paul Romatschke for winning a 2012 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. The award was announced on Wednesday, February 15th.
