Profile

I am studying neutrinos. Neutrinos are one of what we call “fundamental particles”, which means we can’t separate them. Fundamental particles (neutrinos, electrons, quarks, bosons), are the actual smallest things the scientists came up with since the beginning of the 1900’s. These fundamental particles are the constituents of everything, water, iron, Earth, Sun… They are even filling the vacuum(!) Since their successive discoveries, particle physics scientists (like me) are trying to understand their properties, how they “behave”… They are several ways of doing this, but a fairly easy one is to literally smash them together when they have a very high speed and try to see if something strange pops out in a detector.

Now for the neutrinos: From all the fundamental particles, the neutrinos are the most abundant in the universe, so it is very important to know their properties to understand our universe. Secondly, almost all observations that we make now on Earth when we smash particles together agree very, very well with the theory of what is called the standard model of particle, all except the observations we make about neutrinos. This means that we don’t really understand some things that happen with them.

The experiment that I am working on is based in Japan, it is called T2K. The name T2K means Tokai to Kamioka. They are 2 places on each side of Japan where the experiment takes place. What happens is that we create neutrinos in Tokai and let them propagate all the way to Kamioka, which is 280km further. Then we detect the neutrinos in a huge swimming pool with thousands of detectors all around it. In this way we can study some transport properties of the neutrinos like oscillations…

My typical working day is quite simple: I arrive at the university and log on the computer, on which I spend basically all the day. Of course there are some times where I do something different from being on a computer: I interact with other students when I struggle with a problem, or sometimes with professors (for bigger problems), I also attend few classes, I solve problems with a pen and sheet of paper too, and I take coffee breaks…

My work is like a very big problem of mathematics, and I will probably need several months to solve it. There were some times when I worked several day to solve a part of the problem, and I found out that I was completely wrong! This is very normal for a scientist (or everybody) in front of a hard problem to make big mistakes and to get everything wrong. It’s important to know what were the errors and find out why something went wrong.

I basically use the computer as a super-calculator. The computer makes long and repetitive calculations with the data recorded in the experiment. My job is to tell what the computer should do if I want to solve my problem. We also discuss with scientists of the lab (at my university or anywhere in the world) how we should do it, who does what… We can have long discussion through Skype for example.

There are some other things also sometimes that I have to do, like attend some conference, where scientists from other experiments come and present their results, otherwise I read a lot of articles to try to stay up to date!