• Question: What was the most recent piece of research that you did? and what did you find out from it?

    Asked by anon-361221 on 30 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Lucien Heurtier

      Lucien Heurtier answered on 30 Mar 2023:

      Oh I like this question!

      The most recent paper I published was really cool. It’s called ‘Hunting for Neutral Lepton with Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays’.

      The idea is that in space, there are cosmic rays that have a HUGE energy. To give you an idea, that’s an energy that is a billion time larger than the energy we can obtain on Earth with particles colliders like CERN. So my idea was to use these cosmic rays, when they come and collide with the Earth as a natural cosmological collider, very much like the particle colliders we build on Earth but much much more powerful. With my collaborators, we studied how we could search for new particles called ‘Neutral leptons’ with these cosmic rays, and we found quite promising results! We made a proposal for an experiment called POEMMA, and told them to use explosions that happen in the Universe to search for these new particles!

      I was very excited about this project, I was sometimes working late at night to obtain better and better results and it worked well!

      I hope I answered your question well enough! Feel free to ask more, and don’t forget…

      … to vote for your favorite scientist 😉

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