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Have you ever heard of neutrinos? Neutrinos are the tiniest particles in the universe, yet one of the least understood.

What do we know about neutrinos?

Well… they are tiny and they are *everywhere*! If you look at your thumb right now, every second there are a hundred billion neutrinos passing through your thumbnail!

But where do they come from? Neutrinos are produced in various different reactions, for example most neutrinos reaching the Earth are produced inside the Sun (they are products of the thermonuclear reactions), but we have neutrinos coming from cosmic rays (no, cosmic rays are not a lethal weapon, just ask me more about it if you are interested!) or from supernova explosion (yes, just like the song by Muse).

Neutrinos are very special for different reasons:

– they are *everywhere* and so make up quite a lot of our universe, but we don’t know how much they weight

– they behave very weirdly sometimes, we say they “oscillate”, this means they are produced on one flavour and change flavour while they move (eg in my experiment we produce “blue” neutrinos on one side of Japan and we throw them on the other side of Japan and once they arrived, they changed into “red” neutrinos!)

– matter and anti-matter behave in a peculiar way with neutrinos. Do you know what’s antimatter? Want to talk about it?

I work on an experiment that is set in Japan! It’s a really big experiment because it goes from one side to the other of Japan (around 300 km from the sites). This means that I get to go very often to Japan to play with our experiment, but when I’m in the office I mainly spend my day working at my desktop computer trying to interpret our nature (ie our data) as best as I can!