RE: The Orca and Pingu projects for understanding neutrinos better
Neutrino!!! It is one of the very first thing get my attention aside from proton, neutron, and electron when I was in high school !!! By the way, there was a neutrino lab inside a tunnel in Hong Kong actually (brief intro here)
Just omit the chinese character, you can see more photos in this link
Unfortunately, the project was complete and shut down in 2014 but one is saying that they would like to re-open this lab.
It is pretty amazing that there is a particle physics lab in Hong Kong (though it is small), as I had been repeatedly told that physics research in HK is heavily focused on astronomy, due to the low running cost.... that's really sad
humm...... btw the blue line in the "the T2K experiment" looks so similar to the Boltzmann distribution to me lol
The Daya Bay experiment indeed managed to measure for the first time the first-third generation mixing parameter and show it was non zero (which is connected to the Hong Kong tunnel). So even if the project is over, the results were very important (and independently confirmed later).
Btw, the lbue line has nothing to do with the T2K experiment, but this is the website where I found the curve ;)
I am really amazed by the setting of the lab which have to be deep in the mountain, which was explained to be minimizing the interference from cosmic ray. Haha, there are way more things to learn before starting the experiments!