T2K receives a prize from a French science magazine

LePrixLaRecherche2012

T2K has been awarded a prestigious prize by La Recherche, a French science magazine. This prize is called “Le Prix La Recherche” and has 12 categories including biology, chemistry, mathematics and medicine. T2K received the physics prize for finding the first indications of oscillations from muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos. Some T2K collaborators can be…

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T2K updates its electron-neutrino appearance result using its full dataset obtained by summer 2012

The T2K collaboration presented new results on oscillations from muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos at the 2012 International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. These oscillations are predicted by quantum physics if neutrinos have non-zero masses. The new results were obtained with more than twice as much data as the T2K paper published…

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T2K Presents New Results that confirms their Electron Neutrino Appearance Results published in July 2011

At the 2012 Neutrino conference in Kyoto, Japan, the T2K collaboration presented new results on electron neutrino appearance from muon neutrino that confirmed their previous published results in PRL, in July 2011, which reported the first single experimental indication that θ13 is non-zero and large with a 2.5 σ level of significance. Based on the…

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First T2K beam neutrino event in Super-Kamiokande since March 2011 earthquake

T2Krun3firstevent

The first T2K beam neutrino event since the earthquake of March 2011 was seen in Super-Kamiokande (T2K’s far detector) on 26th Janaury 2012. It is shown in the event display above, and has a Cherenkov ring produced by a muon in the centre of the image. This muon was produced when a muon neutrino in…

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T2K publishes first off-axis measurement of muon-neutrino disappearance

T2K has published the first measurement of muon-neutrino disappearance by an off-axis experiment in Physical Review D at http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v85/i3/e031103. The T2K beam is mostly composed of muon neutrinos, and 104 muon-neutrino events would have been expected in T2K’s far detector Super Kamiokande if there were no neutrino oscillations. However only 31 such events were observed,…

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The T2K Experiment

T2K is a neutrino experiment designed to investigate how neutrinos change from one flavour to another as they travel (neutrino oscillations). An intense beam of muon neutrinos is generated at the J-PARC nuclear physics site on the East coast of Japan and directed across the country to the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector in the mountains of western Japan. The beam is measured once before it leaves the J-PARC site, using the near detector ND280, and again at Super-K: the change in the measured intensity and composition of the beam is used to provide information on the properties of neutrinos.

Map showing J-PARC and Super-K

Science Goals of T2K

  • the discovery of νμ → νe ( i.e. the confirmation that θ13 > 0 )
  • precision measurements of oscillation parameters in νμ disappearance
  • a search for sterile components in νμ disappearance by observation of neutral-current events
  • world-leading contributions to neutrino-nucleus cross-section measurements