FEDOR ŠIMKOVIC: BILLIONS OF THEM PASS-THROUGH US EVERY SECOND

The nuclear physicist and ESET Science Award laureate reveals what tantalising information neutrinos can tell us about the cosmos

- Daisy Dobrijevic

BIO

Professor Fedor Šimkovic Nuclear and subnuclear physicist Šimkovic works at the Department of Nuclear Physics and Biophysics at Comenius University in Bratislava. He leads a team of young scientists and doctoral students in studying the fundamental properties of neutrinos - the most widespread elementary particles in the universe. His research covers various scientific fields of atomic physics, nuclear physics, particle physics and astrophysics. Šimkovic is an ESET Science Award laureate, winning the Outstanding Individual Contributor to Slovak Science award in 2020.

You study neutrinos. Could you explain what they are?

Neutrinos are one of the most abundant fundamental particles in the universe. They come in three types, or flavours: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos. A neutrino is similar to an electron but has no electrical charge and a tiny mass. Neutrinos are not part of an atom, unlike protons, neutrons and electrons. Like other constituents of the Standard Model of particle physics, they are assumed to be point-like objects - they aren't made of any smaller pieces that we know of.

According to the Standard Model, there exist 12 fundamental particles, namely three families of leptons - electron, muon and tau and corresponding neutrinos - up quarks and down quarks and their antimatter versions. The most abundant are neutrinos, created in the universe's first second just after the Big Bang. Theory predicts that there are 340 Big Bang neutrinos in every cubic centimetre in the universe. Due to very low energy, they have not been experimentally confirmed yet. They form a cosmic neutrino background with a very low temperature of about -271 degrees Celsius [-455 degrees Fahrenheit).