Inside the Big Bang

There’s a new player in our drive to understand the very deepest secrets of the universe – although ‘new’ may be a bit of a stretch for something that’s been around for more than 13 billion years. But the humble neutrino, everywhere around us but fiendishly difficult to locate, could unlock a new world of understanding, if recent breakthroughs are anything to go by.

The story begins with the Big Bang. This seismic event should, the scientists tell us, have created matter and antimatter in equal proportion. But that’s not the case. “Virtually everything we can see – you, the magazine or screen in front of you, the stars – is made of matter,” says Dr Patrick Dunne (PhD Physics 2016), who is a leading member of the Imperial neutrino team of 20 people, including two postdoctoral research associates and three PhD students. That leaves only the smallest fraction of one per cent as antimatter, and no one knows why.

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