Elusive phenomena observed by Queen Mary scientists

Physicists have confirmed the surprising behaviour of one of nature's most unusual particles called neutrinos, which are thought to play a fundamental role in the formation of the universe. The sun and radioactive decays are a natural sources of neutrino production. Described as 'ghost particles' because they are highly elusive and simply pass through the environment with almost no effect, neutrinos have been very difficult to study, until now. The Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) experiment in Japan produces a beam of neutrinos in the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) located in Tokai village, on the east coast of Japan, north of Tokyo. The neutrino beam is monitored by a detector that is almost 200 miles away on the west coast of Japan. The large distance between the beam and detector is necessary to allow the neutrinos to change state, because they are so light the distance has to be hundreds of kilometres. The experiment has observed that the neutrino changes 'flavour' from a ' muon' neutrino at the time of production to an ' electron' neutrino by the time of detection.