LBNE elects spokespersons, gains momentum

Building a team of experts to create the world's most intense, long-distance neutrino beamline takes time, forward thinking and good leaders.

That is especially true when that beamline is aimed at a US-based particle detector more than 10 times the size of the largest LHC detector.

Bob Svoboda

With the election of its first spokespersons, the proposed Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment has cemented its bid to unlock the mysteries of the neutrinos that permeate the world around us. Studying the light-mass neutrino could reveal an imprint of asymmetric behavior from a heavier cousin neutrino that scientists suspect existed at the time of the Big Bang and tipped the scales of the universe to allow baryonic matter to dominate antimatter.

Bob Svoboda from the University of California, Davis and Milind Diwan from Brookhaven National Laboratory were tapped three years ago by the National Science Foundation to put together an experimental team for the proposed LBNE. The collaboration elected them to continue working as closely as spokespersons on the experiment's research goals and infrastructure needs. The duo plan to work toward increased collaboration between Fermilab and Brookhaven laboratories.

Milind Diwan

Svoboda and Diwan bring a breadth of experience from working with neutrinos for about 25 years each. Svoboda serves as co-spokesperson on the Double Chooz experiment in France. Diwan participates in the MINOS experiment at Fermilab and the Daya Bay experiment in China. These are crucial experiments that will set the stage for LBNE.

Diwan was one of the original proponents in 2001 of building LBNE to take advantage of the recent discovery that neutrinos had mass. That discovery opened the door for neutrinos to become dark matter candidates and the linchpin to the evolution of visible matter.

"Just that discovery is of tremendous importance in how we understand the workings of the world. This has multiple consequences for our understanding," Diwan says. "Detection of CP violation in neutrinos as well as unambiguous determination of the mass ordering of neutrinos needs a next-generation accelerator and detector facility; there is no question about that. The same detector could discover a lot of other physics: decay of a proton, for example."

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-- Tona Kunz

New employees - Dec. 14

Row one from left: Piali Yang, WDRS; and Krista Larson, CD. Row two from left: John Campbell, PPD; Dan Marks, TD; and Daniel Evbota, TD.

Dark matter 'beach ball' unveiled

The giant halo of dark matter that surrounds our galaxy is shaped like a flattened beach ball, researchers say.

It is the first definitive measure of the scope of the dark matter that makes up the majority of galaxies' masses.

The shape of this "dark matter halo" was inferred from the path of debris left behind as the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy slowly orbits the Milky Way.

A team of US astronomers announced the findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington.

Dark matter is a mysterious kind of matter that makes up nearly a quarter of the mass in the universe, but does not interact with light and so has until now remained invisible to scientists.

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