Neutrino Factory

The Neutrino Factory is a proposed particle accelerator complex intended to measure in detail the properties of neutrinos, which are extremely weakly interacting fundamental particles that can travel in straight lines through normal matter for thousands of kilometres. Up until the 1990s, neutrinos were assumed to be massless, but experimental results from searches for solar neutrinos (those produced in the Sun's core) and others are inconsistent with this assumption, and thus indicate that the neutrino does have a very small mass (see Solar neutrino problem).

The Neutrino Factory will create a fairly focused beam of neutrinos at one site on the Earth and fire it downwards, probably in two beams emitted in different directions from a racetrack shaped underground muon storage ring, until the beams resurface at other points. One example could be a complex in the UK sending beams to Japan (see Super-Kamiokande) and Italy (LNGS). The properties of the neutrinos will be examined at the remote sites to determine how neutrinos evolve over time. This will provide information about their masses and weak interaction properties.

The project is currently in the conceptual design stage. An international "Scoping Study" was completed in 2007 and an international effort to write a design report has now begun.

Many new technologies are being pioneered for this experiment, including the use of liquid metal jets as a pion production target, under test in the MERIT experiment, the use of Fixed Field Alternating Gradient (FFAG) accelerators, under test in the EMMA experiment, and liquid hydrogen energy reduction cavities for reducing the divergence in the muon beam during the intermediate stages.

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