"Buried 700 meters beneath the rolling hills of southern China, an enormous neutrino observatory called JUNO has released its first results after a mere 59 days of operation. And so far, they are very promising, physicists say. The physics result is already world-leading in the areas that it touches, says particle physicist Juan Pedro Ochoa-Ricoux of the University of California, Irvine, who co-leads a team on JUNO."
"JUNOshort for Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatoryhas been tasked with a tall order: determine the ordering of masses of the three types of neutrino. In other words, do they follow a normal mass ordering, where the first flavor of neutrino is the lightest and the third the heaviest, or an inverted one, in which the third neutrino mass state is the lightest? The answer to this question holds myriad implications, from informing other experiments to uncovering new physics to explaining certain cosmological mysteries."
An underground neutrino observatory, JUNO, sits 700 meters beneath southern China's hills. It completed a 59-day run that produced measurements of two neutrino oscillation parameters that currently rank as the best worldwide. The detector is a spherical, 13-story-tall vessel primarily measuring electron antineutrinos emitted by nearby Yangjian and Taishan nuclear plants. JUNO's primary objective is to determine the neutrino mass ordering among three mass states, normal or inverted. Determining the ordering carries implications for other experiments, potential new physics, cosmology, and the role of neutrinos in the universe's matter distribution. Results appear in two preprints on arXiv.org.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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