Mark Hartz

Research Specialization

Neutrinos, especially neutrino mixing; Antimatter; Charge-Parity (CP) violation.

Experimental observations of neutrino oscillations through the mixing of their mass and flavour states have established that neutrinos have mass. Recently, T2K and other experiments have established the mixing of neutrinos through the third and smallest mixing angle, which opens the door for Charge-Parity (CP) violation in neutrino oscillations. If CP violation is present, neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, will oscillate differently. This CP violation signature can be observed by experiments which produce beams of muon neutrinos (antineutrinos) that oscillate to electron neutrinos (antineutrinos). To this end, I am participating in the T2K experiment, which aims a beam of muon neutrinos produced at the J-PARC accelerator facility in Japan towards the Super-Kamiokande detector that is 295 km away. By observing muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillations, we are able to make precision measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters. I am particularly interested in the ability of T2K to search for CP violation by producing a beam of antineutrinos, as well as future experiments such as Hyper-K that will more precisely measure the amount of CP violation.

Research Areas