Recipient organisationKing's College LondonSource-published name: King's College London
Funding£488K
PeriodSept 2025 — Sept 2027
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Neutrinos streaming from the Sun and nuclear reactors are passing through the King’s College London lab, and researchers there are building detectors to catch them. The team is trying to solve a fundamental puzzle: why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter. They measure a process called CP violation in neutrino oscillations, which could explain why matter survived after the Big Bang. The group also hunts for dark matter particles using the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment and is helping design a next-generation liquid xenon observatory. A new effort uses atom interferometry to detect gravitational waves in a frequency band no current instrument can reach. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. But past work on neutrinos led to the discovery that they have mass—a finding that reshaped the Standard Model of particle physics. If these experiments succeed, they could rewrite our understanding of the early universe and the laws that govern it.
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Our strategy addresses three of the STFC challenges: C1 (fundamental particles), C2 (fundamental laws and symmetries) and C8 (asymmetry between matter and antimatter). Our central involvement, and the one with which we founded our group at King’s in 2019, is in neutrino physics. The experiments we are involved in revolve around two high-level topics: understanding the matter-antimatter asymmetry measuring CP violation (T2K, Super-K, Hyper-K) and lepton flavour violation (SNO+, LEGEND), both are required by Sakharov’s conditions, and also astrophysics (IceCube, and also the above experiments can do astrophysics). It is a mix of currently running and future experiments, which can achieve higher potential. The direct detection of dark matter (DM) is a new research area for the group, established in 2022. The strategy is to pursue world-leading physics results using data from the now-running LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, and taking a leading role in the construction of the proposed next-generation XLZD LXe-observatory at Boulby or elsewhere. King’s is actively engaged in technology R&D for current and future experiments, with a new initiative focusing on DRD-UK in liquid detectors Quantum Technologies for Fundamental Physics is an emerging area of importance for King’s, and activities are focused on the Atom Interferometric Observatory and Network (AION) project. AION is a proposed research infrastructure that will allow studies of DM and gravitational waves (GWs) from cosmological and astrophysical sources in the highly relevant but currently inaccessible mid-frequency band.
Christopher McCabe (Co-Investigator)Francesca Di Lodovico (Principal Investigator)James Dobson (Co-Investigator)Jeanne Wilson (Co-Investigator)John Ellis (Co-Investigator)Teppei Katori (Co-Investigator)
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