LSU Researchers Detect First Neutrino Events at Facilities in Japan: T2K experiment off to good start. - Thomas Kutter and his colleagues on the Tokai to Kamioka Long Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Experiment (T2K) have detected the first neutrino events generated by their newly built neutrino beam at the J-PARC accelerator laboratory in Tokai, Japan. The initial neutrino events were detected in a “near” detector (INGRID) whose purpose is to determine the neutrino beam’s direction and profile before it travels to the “far” detector at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino laboratory 183 miles away near Toyama. Super-Kamiokande, a 50,000 ton tank of ultra-pure water located over half a mile underground, will be used together with the near detectors to perform the most sensitive search for oscillations between all three types of neutrinos at the same time. 

A recent article in Nature Physics documents the transfer of frequency comb production from the optical region to the vacuum ultraviolet region for the first time. In collaboration with experimental colleagues at JILA in Boulder, the ultrafast AMO theory group at LSU (Gaarde, Hostetter, Schafer, Tate) demonstrates how the technique of high harmonic generation can preserve the temporal coherence necessary to generate a frequency comb structure in the 7th harmonic (153 nm) of an intense infrared laser pulse. This work unites high precision spectroscopy, a specialty of the JILA group, with strong field physics, which has been extensively studied at LSU.