The Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) experiment in Japan and the NuMI Off-axis ve Appearance (NOvA) experiment in the United States, previously considered rival experiments, conducted a joint analysis and published their first results today (Oct 22) in the journal Nature.
Both are long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments using accelerators, and by leveraging their different baselines and neutrino energies, they achieved precision measurements of neutrino oscillations.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that are neutral and weigh almost nothing, and almost never interact with the matter around them, making them notoriously hard to study. However, they may hold the secret to why the universe is now filled with matter and light. Everything known about particle physics tells scientists that when the universe began there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which when they collide, annihilate to form light.
