• Question: What do you research?

    Asked by holly1912 to Zachary, Tim, Venus on 15 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by saskia123, pinkpuppy123.
    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      Thanks for the question. In physics there are experimentalists, those how build and operate the experiments, and theorists, those how come up with theories to explain the experiments. I’m a theorist who works on the most basic questions trying to find “the theory” that will unify physics. The big problem is to find a theory that can explain gravity and all the other forces in one framework. That’s the problem that Einstein couldn’t solve. Maybe we have a solution called string theory where the basic things are tiny strings rather than particles It’s a very radical idea but it does seem to solve a lot of problems. But there are many more things to understand like what is happening inside a black hole for example. That’s good there’s plenty to think about.

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      My personal research is based around figuring out the probability of an interacting neutrino producing something called a neutral-pion.

      Neutrinos are very elusive particles: they have almost no mass and interact with almost nothing, so we don’t know a lot about them. This interaction I mentioned: neutrinos creating neutral-pions, is a very messy interaction that interferes with a lot of neutrino experiments. A lot of interesting signals in our experiments can be mimicked by this neutral pion.

      Accurately finding the probability of this specific interaction happening will help other neutrino experiments because they’ll be able to use that probability to account for this ‘neutral pion effect’, leaving them in a better position to discover interesting stuff about the elusive neutrino.

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