Today saw the start of a new major new experiment in Japan that will beam neutrinos from one side of the country to the other. Neutrinos are neutral, elementary particles denoted by the Greek letter ν (hence the clever title), and they come in three types. The Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) experiment hopes to better understand how they oscillate, that is switch from one kind to another. They do that by firing neutrinos created by the 30GeV main ring of the proton synchrotron at JPARC in Tokai to a massive detector filled with 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water in the Kamioka mine in Gifu (neutrinos don’t interact very often with the rest of the world, so it takes a detector that size to see anything).

Neutrino oscillations are an important detail in the Standard Model of particle physics, and T2K hopes to better pin down the exact nature of the oscillations.

Physicists in the United Kingdom played a big role in the T2K project. They designed the target that creates neutrinos out of protons at JPARC and wrote the data acquisition software for some of the detectors. All told, the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC) estimates it spent around £14.3 million on the project.

Unfortunately, many physicists are worried about the UK’s continued participation in the T2K project. The STFC is currently suffering from a £40 million funding shortfall, and is reviewing major projects like T2K to decide which to keep and which to cut.

I wrote a story for this week’s issue of Nature that discusses the STFC’s situation in depth (although we didn’t go into T2K specifically). It will be out tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Credit: Kamioka Observatory, ICRR, Univ. of Tokyo