Joshua B. Albert, Entered 2006/07
Office Location: 276 Physics
Office Phone: 919-660-2581
Email Address: jba10@phy.duke.edu
Specialties:
Experimental high energy physics
Research Categories: Neutrino Physics
Current projects: Super-Kamiokande, T2K
Research Description: I work on the Super-Kamiokande (SK) and Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) experiments. These collaborations are working to learn more about neutrinos, which are some of the hardest particles to detect in nature. SK is the world's most awesome neutrino detector (determined from original research). It's a 50 kton water Cherenkov detector located in the Kamioka mine near Mozumi, Japan. It's array of 11,146 inner detector PMTs and 1885 outer detector PMTs allow it to detect neutrinos produced in the atmosphere and from other sources while rejecting the numerous backgrounds such as cosmic ray muons. While I am working with SK on atmospheric neutrino studies, I am also involved in the T2K experiment, which is a neutrino beam experiment that uses SK as a far detector. A beam of muon neutrinos will be sent from the J-PARC accelerator in Tokai and travel 295 km beneath Japan to SK. We will look for appearance of electron neutrinos due to oscillation in this beam. This experiment may teach us a great deal about the nature of neutrino oscillation, but, in any case, will improve our limits on the oscillation parameters.
Areas of Interest:
neutrinos