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Collaboration

Project 8 Experiment

Project 8 Experiment

The goal of Project 8 is to measure the mass of the neutrino, which is a fundamental particle (that is, a basic building block of the universe). Neutrinos are incredibly abundant - for every atom in the universe, there are about a billion neutrinos. However, our experience with them is minimal because they barely interact with ordinary matter. In fact, trillions of neutrinos produced by nuclear processes in the sun pass through your body every second, like tiny ghosts.

Instead of trying to capture the neutrino itself, we look at the decay of tritium, which is an isotope of hydrogen. Tritium undergoes beta decay, emitting an electron and a neutrino which have to share the energy released in the decay. Using a new method based radio-frequency detection, we measure the energy of the electron very precisely. Whatever is "missing" must belong to the neutrino. For the highest electron energies, the missing energy amounts to the neutrino's mass. [Text and image from https://www.project8.org/]

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Name Role Affiliations Email Phone Office Centers Research topics
Srinikitha Bhagvati Srinikitha Bhagvati Graduate Student Physics skb6413@psu.edu 108 Osmond Laboratory CMA Dark Matter
Carmen Carmona Benitez Carmen Carmona Benitez Faculty Physics mzc267@psu.edu +1 814 865 6476 320D Osmond Laboratory CMA Dark Matter, Neutrinos
Salvatore Cordova Salvatore Cordova Staff Physics sac6821@psu.edu 857891241 NA Osmond Laboratory IGC
Reagen Garcia Reagen Garcia Graduate Student Physics rgarcia@psu.edu --- 114 Osmond Laboratory CMA Neutrinos
Richard Mueller Richard Mueller Graduate Student Physics rjm6826@psu.edu +1 814 865 7533 6E Osmond Laboratory IGC Neutrinos
Andrew Ziegler Andrew Ziegler Graduate Student Physics ziegler@psu.edu 6E Osmond Laboratory CMA Neutrinos
Luiz de Viveiros Luiz de Viveiros Faculty Physics lad57@psu.edu +1 814 865 7533 320E Osmond Laboratory CMA Dark Matter, Neutrinos
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.