Dr. Patrick Huber

Research topics

neutrino oscillation
matter effects (standard and non-standard)
leptonic CP violation
long-baseline neutrino experiments
reactor neutrinos
...

Assistant Professor at the Virgina Tech Physics Department

One of the most exciting discoveries during the last years was that neutrinos do oscillate, i.e. they have a mass in contradiction to the standard model, where neutrinos are strictly massless. The evidence for neutrino oscillation is steadily increasing, which makes neutrinos an especially interesting subject of research, since they provide the first experimental evidence for physics beyond the standard model. Furthermore the fact that neutrinos are massive opens completely new possibilities like leptonic CP violation with interesting connections to subjects, like the baryon asymmetry of the Universe. Also the structure of neutrino mixing, namely the existence of two large mixing angles, is in sharp contrast with the quark sector. Thus the question arises how to improve the knowledge on neutrinos and to learn in this way more about flavour physics and the ultimate theory of everything.

Since neutrino masses are tiny it will be very difficult to measure their masses directly. Therefore the most plausible key to learn more about them are neutrino oscillation searches. The initial indications for neutrino oscillations were obtained by observing the flavour composition of natural neutrino sources like the Sun or the atmosphere. Year 2002 was decisive in proving neutrino oscillations and settling the long-standing solar neutrino puzzle. Also the pioneer of solar neutrino experiments Ray Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba for his detection of supernova neutrinos were awarded the Nobel prize. The Sudbury neutrino observatory finally was able to show that the flux predictions for the Sun are correct and therefore the observed deficit of electron neutrinos is due to flavour transitions. Furthermore the KamLAND experiment using neutrinos originating in nuclear power stations was able to pin down down the parameters within the so called LMA-MSW region and to strongly reject against alternative mechanisms. Together with the results of Super-Kamiokande on atmospheric neutrinos and the CHOOZ experiment we have now a rough picture of the parameters describing neutrino oscillations: two mass squared differences separated by roughly a factor of 30, two large mixing angles and one very small mixing angle.

The next step is to corroborate this picture, for example by MiniBOONE and to improve on the accuracy. In order to study neutrino oscillations with great precision it is essential to use man-made, and therefore well known neutrino sources together with new neutrino detection technologies. The final goal is to measure the neutrino oscillation parameters including CP violation and possible non-standard properties as accurately as possible.

The sensitivity to the small mixing angle for various planed experiments at the 90 % confidence level. The left edges of the bars correspond to the sensitivity limits from statistics only, the right edges of the bars to the real sensitivity limits after successively switching on systematics (blue), correlations (green), and degeneracies (yellow). This picture was produced with GLoBES.

Publications

Contact

Permanent Address

Department of Physics
Virginia Tech
Robeson Hall
Blacksburg, VA 24061
USA

Current Address

Theory Group
CERN
1211 Geneva 23
Switzerland

Telefone +41 22 767 4523
Email <pahuber AT vt DOT edu>

Last modified: Dec 13 2007