Berkeley Lab physicists and engineers are among the leaders of the unique Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, where Chinese and American scientists, with colleagues from Russia, Taiwan, and the Czech Republic, have come together to investigate a peculiar phenomenon related to so-called neutrino mixing. Kam-Biu Luk of Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, is Daya Bay’s scientific co-spokesperson with Yifang Wang of Beijing’s Institute of High Energy Physics. Bill Edwards of the Lab’s Physics Division is the U.S. Project and Operations Manager.

What the researchers find at Daya Bay will bear on some of the most intriguing questions in basic physics: how much do different kinds of neutrinos weigh? And which kind is the heaviest? By weighing neutrinos scientists hope to learn how electrons and their cousins, muons and tau particles, came into existence in the moments after the big bang. The answers could explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe – and indeed why there is any matter at all.