Probing the nature of the neutrino using SuperNEMO

One mile beneath a mountain in the French Alps, an international team involving UCL scientists is hoping to unlock more secrets of the mysterious neutrino using a new, cutting-edge experiment called SuperNEMO. A UCL team helped to build the hardware and software being used by SuperNEMO - the Super Neutrino Ettore Majorana Observatory - which officially opens at Modane Underground Laboratory in the south of France today. It will be used to look into the origin of the imbalance of matter and anti-matter in the universe which has long left physicists puzzled. The experiment is partly funded by over £7million investment from the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), with collaboration from UCL, Manchester University, Warwick University and Imperial College. The aim is to use SuperNEMO in the search for neutrino-less double-beta decay, a rare nuclear decay which - if observed - could answer some of the biggest fundamental questions in physics and cosmology. Neutrinos are fundamental particles which, despite being the most common matter particles in the Universe, are amongst the least understood. If a neutrino-less double-beta decay is observed by SuperNEMO, it would mean the neutrino is different to all the other matter particles in that it would be its own antiparticle.