Jim Kneller of the physics department recently received a $750,000, five-year grant to fund his research into the shifting identities of neutrino particles and how their origin in supernovae can not only shed light on their scientific significance, but also the nature of supernovae.

According to Kneller , neutrinos are inert subatomic particles that can travel closely to the speed of light.

“Like an electron, they are a fundamental particle,” Kneller said. “They don’t have an electric charge…[and] in fact, this makes them very hard to detect.”

Neutrinos are the result of nuclear reactions that take place during the explosion of a star, or supernova, and they have the capability of passing through extremely dense matter unobstructed, Kneller said.

“There are [many] of them flying through you every second, and none of them are interacting,” Kneller said.

Researchers and astrophysicists can use neutrinos as pointers in the right direction to locate supernovae. However, finding them is the difficult part, according to Kneller .

“Nevertheless, it is possible to detect them…A supernovae will emit a huge number of neutrinos,” he said. “They fly through space, reach us here on Earth and if you build a great, big detector…and fill it with water—for example and surround the tank with light-sensitive detectors—you will see that some of the neutrinos will interact in the water to become an electron or a positron.”

Kneller receives data from these underground detection devices in sites as distant as Japan, and he said he hopes this research will be useful not only in explaining the behavior of neutrinos, but the origin of supernovae themselves.

“It would be great if we could peer inside one so that we could test our ideas of how the star explodes, but that’s not possible by looking through a telescope,” Kneller said. “What we observe is the outside of the star, not the core region where all the action is. But neutrinos fly through even very dense matter unimpeded; if we observe the neutrinos from the supernova we might be able to improve our understanding of how the star blew up.”

However, in order to make any conclusions the first order of business is to elicit meaning from the data he receives Kneller said.

“What the detectors observe will potentially tell us a lot about the neutrino and the supernova,” Kneller said. “The hard part will be to understand the message. The information in the signal is, to some extent, scrambled. A lot of my research is focused upon how that scrambling occurs and how it’s related to the missing information about the neutrino.”

Having done former post-doc work at N.C . State during his international academic career – receiving his undergraduate education from The University of Manchester and a serving the post of ‘Chercheur’ at Le Institut de Physique Nucleaire Orsay – Kneller said he was pleased to be back at the University, continuing his research.