'Ghostly' neutrinos provide new path to study protons - Phys.org

Members of the international collaboration MINERvA, including University of Rochester researchers, used a particle accelerator at Fermilab—a portion of which is shown in a stylized image above—to create a beam of neutrinos to investigate the structure of protons.

"While we were studying neutrinos as part of the MINERvA experiment, I realized a technique I was using might be applied to investigate protons," says Tejin Cai, the paper's first author.

The researchers struck their detector made of hydrogen and carbon atoms with the beam of neutrinos and recorded data for nearly nine years of operation.

Making this work required great performance from the detector, creative analysis from scientists, and years of running" the accelerator at Fermilab.

"When Tejin and our colleague Arie Bodek (the George E. Pake Professor of Physics at Rochester) first suggested trying this analysis, I thought it would be too difficult," McFarland says.

"Our work is one step forward in answering the fundamental questions about neutrino physics that are the goal of these big science projects in the near future."