Seminars

First Results from the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)

Name: First Results from the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)
Start: 2026-10-02T13:00:00+01:00
End: 2026-10-02T14:00:00+01:00
Location: Bohr Conference Room

by Dr Xianguo Lu (University of Warwick)

Friday 2 Oct 2026, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/London

Bohr Conference Room

Description

Neutrinos are among the most abundant yet least understood particles in nature. The discovery of neutrino oscillations established that they have mass, providing compelling evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model. Determining their remaining unknown properties is a central challenge in particle physics.

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a new 20-kton liquid-scintillator detector in southern China designed to address this challenge through precision measurements of reactor antineutrinos. Following the completion of construction in 2024 and commissioning in 2025, JUNO began physics data taking in August 2025 and has already delivered its first scientific results.

This seminar will introduce JUNO’s physics goals, outline the detector’s construction and commissioning, and present its first reactor antineutrino measurements. These include world-leading determinations of the solar neutrino oscillation parameters and substantially improved constraints on the atmospheric mass-squared splitting, demonstrating JUNO’s performance and laying the groundwork for determining the neutrino mass ordering.