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Mysterious neutrinos and where to find them

Talk

Dr Nicola McConkey, Queen Mary University of London
Event date
Wednesday 1 April 2026, 6.30pm to 7.30pm
Location
Online only
Audience
Open to alumni, staff, students, the public
Admission
Free admission, booking required

Event details

Nuclear Masterclass Webinar Series

Neutrinos are everywhere in the universe! One hundred trillion neutrinos are passing through your body every second, but the chance of one stopping is so small that over the course of your lifetime, just one neutrino might stop.  That makes this tiny elusive particle very tricky to measure and challenging to understand — there are many mysteries around the way these particles behave. 

Where do neutrinos come from? How do they fit into our current picture of the universe? How do we even know they exist? And how do we build particle detectors to measure their properties?  Join Dr Nicola McConkey as she tackles these topics and discusses how neutrino physics might hold the key to understanding some of the most fundamental questions about the universe. 

This webinar is part of the Nuclear Physics Masterclasses. GCSE (or equivalent) students can register to attend the full Pre-16 Nuclear Masterclass and A-level students (or equivalent) can register to attend the full Post-16 Nuclear Masterclass. The webinars are open to all.  

 

About the speaker

Dr Nicola McConkey is a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She is an experimental particle physicist who spends her time developing technology to make precision measurements of one of the universe’s most elusive particles — the neutrino. When not building neutrino detectors, she can be found folk dancing and playing music, including on one notable occasion playing violin inside of a particle detector at CERN!