Imperial College London
Physics

The study of neutrino physics has been making tremendous advances over the last several decades. The measurements of neutrino properties have gone from the speculative to the precise, leading to the award of the 2015 Nobel Prize and the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Physics to a group of experiments including the Super-Kamiokande and T2K experiments which are one focus of my research.

Neutrinos could well be part of the answer to the question of how matter won out over anti-matter shortly after the Big Bang which is one of the great puzzles of how the Universe came to be. Answering this question is the main goal of the next-generation projects DUNE and Hyper-Kamiokande.

Crucial to interpreting the results of these billion-dollar, thousand-person efforts is developing a detailed understanding of the complex nuclear physics involved in the interactions of neutrinos with the atoms in the detectors. However, the previous models are not precise for this purpose. To overcome this requires new mathematical models to be built from the bottom-up which describe neutrino-nucleus interactions, and for these to be made accessible to physicists in the field, making use of methods such as machine learning and parallel programming.

I am one of only a few theoretical physicists who is working directly with experimental neutrino physicists and bridging the gap between models and data from the theoretical side. So far, this unique perspective has allowed me to create my MK-model (two single-author publications) which has now been taken up by all longbaseline neutrino experiments. As the sole developer and driving force behind the MK-model, I am in a unique position to extend the MK-model to more complex interactions. I propose to incorporate data from many past and future experiments to develop the most precise unified neutrino-nucleus scattering model.