​
Sowjanya Gollapinni, PhD

See the EXPERIMENTS page for more details on the experiments and group activities.
Research
My research is focused on studying one of the fundamental particles in the Universe called neutrinos. In the world of subatomic physics, neutrinos form the most bizarre tiny entities known to date. Scientists study these elusive particles to understand the biggest puzzles in the universe, from the structure of the atom to the formation of a star. Neutrinos form the second most abundant particle in the Universe after photons and are produced by many sources such as the Sun, the Stars, Nuclear reactors, and even by bananas! Although more than a trillion of these little particles pass unnoticed through our bodies every second, neutrinos still remain largely mysterious. These shy particles are notoriously difficult to detect given how rarely they interact with normal matter. In your entire lifetime, perhaps one neutrino will interact with an atom in your body. Neutrinos also have the ability to morph into one another which makes it even more difficult to detect them. Despite these challenges, researchers have managed to capture a handful of neutrinos by building large and sensitive detectors in some of the most remote places on the planet, including deep in the Antarctic ice, miles under a mine in Canada, and under a mountain in Japan.
​
The current and next generation neutrino experiments are aimed at resolving some of the very important open questions in particle physics such as Charge-Parity (CP) violation with neutrinos (Why is there matter-anti-matter asymmetry in the Universe?), "Sterile" neutrinos (Are there more than 3 types of neutrinos?), supernovae neutrinos (astrophysical phenomena), and nucleon decay searches (proton decay is not observed till date). Additionally, there is also a lot of active ongoing effort to build advanced detector technologies to achieve the precision we need to make these measurements. The Liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) technology is currently driving the neutrino physics program for several years into the future. I am currently part of the MicroBooNE, Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) and Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) LArTPC experiment collaborations. Including the ICARUS experiment, MicroBooNE and SBND are also part of a larger program at Fermilab called "Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN)" program receiving neutrinos on the same Booster Neutrino Beamline (BNB) at different distances.
​
​