Particles in the limelight CERN researchers’ discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson received widespread media coverage. The year saw other remarkable findings in particle physics. XENON100 closes in on dark matter By improving the precision of their experiment by a factor of 3.5 compared to their 2011 results, researchers from the XENON100 international collaboration have now provided the most precise measurement ever made of the possible properties of dark matter. Although never observed, astrophysicists believe that dark matter could make up around 83% of the total matter in the universe. The next goal is to actually detect some WIMPs, the hypothetical particles making up dark matter and whose nature today remains totally unknown. Physical Review Letters November 2012 40 The massive Super-Kamiokande detector used in the T2K experiment in Japan, aimed at studying the neutrino oscillation mechanism. At the bottom of the image, a team can be seen inspecting the detector while it is still empty. Neutrino transformation confirmed Scientists from the T2K collaboration in Japan have confirmed that they have detected the transformation, or oscillation, of muon neutrinos (one of the three types of neutrino) into electron neutrinos. This result paves the way for the investigation of the same phenomenon in their antiparticles: finding a difference in the oscillation probabilities could shed light on the difference between matter and antimatter and thus help to explain why matter is so much more common than antimatter in the universe. 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics June 2012, Kyoto, Japan A year at CNRS 2012
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