THOMAS1	Determining the mass hierarchy of the three fundamental neutrinos
Type	Computational/data analysis
#students	1 or 2 together
Orientation	Why is the scientific problem of interest at all? Neutrino mass is the first concrete example of physics in contradiction to the Standard Model. There are two outstanding unknown characteristics of neutrinos, the mass ordering of the three neutrino flavours and the value of the CP violating phase. Non-zero CP violation in the neutrino sector could provide a mechanism for the matter-anti-matter asymmetry in the universe, and is therefore one of the most important and fundamental issues facing physics today.
How	How is the research going to shed light on the given problem?. Presently, there are two experiments which could deliver these last. The two experiments will have to pool their knowledge to fully exploit their independent observations but this is not trivial, given uncertainties on the other measured values in the mixing matrix.
What	What is the specific thing that the student will do, and how does it fit inside the overall project? The aim of this project is to produce a strategy for combining the information from the two experiments, taking into account all that is known about the mixing, and unknown from the uncertainties in the existing and future measurements, to reach the goal of measuring these two fundamental neutrino characteristics in the fastest possible time.
Special Knowledge	During the course of this project you will learn root (the CERN base data analysis), c++ programming language and the state of the theoretical knowledge of the neutrino sector
Supervisor	Prof. Jenny Thomas jthomas@hep.ucl.ac.uk