Christos Touramanis (right) with Japanese technicians installing one of the smaller modules of the detector made by the Liverpool team
The T2K experiment, which the University is a key partner in, has announced the definitive observation of muon neutrino to electron neutrino transformation. In 2011, the collaboration announced the first indication of this process, a new type of neutrino oscillation. Now, with 3.5 times more data this transformation is firmly established. The probability that random statistical fluctuations alone would produce the observed excess of electron neutrinos is less than one in a trillion. Equivalently the new results exclude such possibility at 7.5 sigma level of significance. Unique flavour This T2Kobservation is the first of its kind in that an explicit appearance of a unique flavour of neutrino at a detection point is unequivocally observed from a different flavour of neutrino at its production point The T2K experiment fires a muon neutrino beam produced at J-PARC on the east coast of Japan towards the 50,000 ton Super-Kamiokande underground detector in western Japan at a distance of 185 miles. An analysis of Super-Kamiokande data finds 28 electron neutrinos when 4.6 are expected if neutrino flavour-mixing would not occur.
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