UW-Madison is now playing a major role in a new partnership in particle physics between the United States and China.
L&S Physics Professors Karsten Heeger and Baha Balantekin, and a team of scientists and engineers from the UW-Madison Physics Department and the Physical Sciences Laboratory, are collaborating with 38 institutions from the US, Europe and China to construct a new underground laboratory at the Daya Bay nuclear power plant near Hong Kong.
Their goal: Study one of the fundamental properties of neutrinos — their oscillation in space and transformation from one neutrino flavor to another.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles with very little mass that were first formed in the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe. They continue to be created in nuclear reactions such as the ones inside a power plant.
By precisely studying their propagation in space Heeger and collaborators hope to find clues whether neutrinos may be able to explain the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe.
Heeger and his group at UW are responsible for the design and construction of the antineutrino detectors, one of the central systems of the experiment. The experiment is now under construction and data taking will begin in late 2010.
The project is supported in the US by the Department of Energy, Office of High Energy Physics.
The Daya Bay experiment is one of the prominent projects through which the University of Wisconsin builds close ties with partnering institutions in China.
For more information and recent media coverage see:
- Physics in China via Physics Today
- Daya Bay Experiment
- Daya Bay at Wisconsin