Phil Barbeau, an assistant professor in physics at Duke, has been awarded an Early Career Research Award from the Office of High Energy Physics in the U.S. Department of Energy.
The five-year grant will help fund Barbeau's efforts to measure the process of coherent scattering of neutrinos off nuclei. Predicted over forty years ago, it has long been one of the “hard” problems in neutrino physics due to the technological challenges in building a particle detector capable of measuring the process. At first blush, the fundamental particle that we call the neutrino does not interact with anything, does not weigh anything, and cannot be observed. The neutrino eluded detection for over two decades and can be difficult to work with, but new developments in detector technologies may soon make it possible to measure coherent neutrino‐nucleus scattering for the first time. Such measurements could open the door to a number of searches for new particles and forces not predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.
Barbeau is one of 44 early career researchers selected this year, from among more than 600 applicants. More information about the program can be found at http://science.energy.gov/early-career.