Prof Jenny Thomas elected to be Co-spokesperson of the MINOS experiment

Professor Jenny Thomas

The chair of STFC's Science Board, Professor Jenny Thomas (UCL Physics and Astronomy), has been elected to be Co-spokesperson of the MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) experiment, an international collaboration of 140 scientists from across the world. The experiment set out to study a recent discovery that neutrinos, elusive neutral partners of the charged leptons of which there are three types, or 'flavours', have a very small but non-zero mass and because of this 'oscillate' from one flavour to another as they travel along at almost the speed of light.

The neutrinos are produced at the NuMI facility at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and are first measured there before their journey of 730km through the earth to northern Minnesota where their flavour and energy are measured again. The experiment has already measured the neutrino oscillation parameters to the highest precision in the world and is now starting to take data with anti-neutrinos.

"It is really an exciting time to be taking over the helm of this experiment," said Jenny, "we have a number of world leading measurements in the process of being published but we also have another data set of the same size which we will analyse in the new year. The anti-neutrino running has just started and the comparison of the neutrino oscillation parameters and those of the anti-neutrinos will be a very important fundamental measurement with broad implications for particle physics and cosmology. Presently MINOS is leading the world on a number of fronts regarding neutrino measurements and will continue to be in that position for some time."