Located 700 meters underground in Guangdong Province, southern China — near Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, and just 53 kilometers from the Taishan and Yangjiang nuclear power plants — the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is emerging as a world-leading facility for neutrino research.
It features a 20-kton liquid scintillator detector, the largest ever built, instrumented with 20,000 large photosensitive detectors providing exceptionally high (> 75\%) optical coverage. With an excellent energy resolution of 3% at 1 MeV, a very high efficiency of neutron tagging, a low radioactivity background level and a low energy threshold (0.2 MeV), JUNO will carry out a uniquely rich physics program. Detecting reactor neutrinos at a medium baseline and using a novel technique that exploits the interference between the solar and atmospheric oscillation frequencies, the primary goal of JUNO is to determine the neutrino mass ordering (NMO) by 2030. This is a key open problem, with tremendous ramifications for our understanding of neutrinos.
In addition, i) JUNO will carry out complementary precision studies of neutrino mixing using solar and atmospheric neutrinos, ii) study neutrinos produced by the Earth (geo-neutrinos) and illuminate the hidden processes of our planet’s heat production, iii) perform the first observation of the diffuse flux of neutrinos from the death of countless ancient stars, iv) enhance our efforts to detect nucleon decay and to bring a grand unified understanding of all forces and of the ultimate fate of our universe, and v) explore the dark universe. JUNO's construction is nearing completion, with full operation expected by August 2025.
The team at Liverpool on JUNO is developing machine learning–based neutrino event reconstruction algorithms, advancing physics simulations through the Liverpool-led GENIE framework, and building statistical analysis tools based on the Liverpool-developed VALOR toolkit. The group’s analysis efforts focus on atmospheric neutrinos measurements to enhance the JUNO NMO sensitivity, and searches for dark sector phenomena.
Team Leader
- Costas Andreopoulos
PhD Students
- Liam Jones
- Ziou He (w/ Warwick)
- Yaoci Cao (w/ Warwick)
- Zekun Yang (starts 10/2025)
- Qianyin g Yu (starts 10/2025)
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