Kenneth Ganezer: NSF Awards More Funding for CSU Dominguez Hills Involvement in International Particle Physics Project

Professor of physics Kenneth Ganezer has secured a research award from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Particle Astrophysics Program. The $330,000 grant will be used to expand the participation of California State University, Dominguez Hills faculty and students in Super-Kamiokande, a nucleon decay and neutrino oscillation experiment that the university has been involved in since 1992, to include a new particle accelerator-based beam project to study neutrino mixing called T2K.

Super-Kamiokande (Super-K) is a nucleon decay and neutrino observatory that was completed in April 1996 in the city of Hida, Japan. The observatory was designed to search for proton decay, study solar and atmospheric neutrinos, and to keep watch for supernovas in the Milky Way. The Super-K project utilizes a 50,000-ton ring-imaging water Cherenkov detector in a mine tunnel beneath about 1,000 meter of rock in nearby Kamioka, Japan, to observe neutrino oscillations, nucleon decay, and neutrino astrophysics. This groundbreaking project has indicated that neutrinos, which are elementary particles that travel close to the speed of light, actually have mass and mix among three basic types.

Ganezer and his students have been involved in data gathering and processing, both at the university and in Japan at the Super-K site for the last 17 years. He says that the award to CSU Dominguez Hills of $330,000 over the next three years signifies the NSF’s recognition of the significance of the Super-K project, which currently involves 31 institutions worldwide.

“We have the best of both possible worlds. We’re conducting an accelerator experiment, which is mainstream particle physics, and a non-accelerator cosmic ray and nucleon decay experiment to search for grand unification of the fundamental forces in nature and to impose experimental constraints on theories of grand unification,” Ganezer says. “Neutrino oscillations, which we’re probing with accelerator experiments, are also related to one of our major Super-K tasks, an anti-matter search, and the same theories that allow for anti-matter transitions, can best explain neutrino oscillations.”

Students and faculty from CSU Dominguez Hills, including James Hill, chair and associate professor of physics, and William Keig, former part-time instructor at CSUDH for a number of years and now associate professor at El Camino Compton Learning Center, will be involved in Super-K’s next phase. The new endeavor involves the expansion of the observatory’s capabilities through a neutrino beam that can travel from Tokaimura in eastern Japan to the original Super-K detector site in Kamioka, which serves as a far detector for the Tokaimura to Kamiokande (T2K) long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. Currently, Ganezer and his colleagues are being assisted in processing Super-K’s data by Mark Gregg, a senior majoring in physics; Mark Lohmann, a senior double majoring in physics/mathematics; and Amaro Moreno, a senior double majoring in physics/economics.

“It’s exciting, getting involved with physics which have not yet been explained and trying to come up with new answers,” Gregg says. “I like the experience I’m getting here, [which gives me] the idea that I might want to do experimental physics in the future.”

Lohmann, who presented his work on Super-K as mentored by Ganezer, at the annual meeting of the California Section of the American Physical Society, says that the opportunity to do this level of research as an undergraduate is “a real learning experience.”

“Working on this project gives you good experience in the type of research you will be doing as a graduate student,” he says. “We’re learning about [topics] that normally you wouldn’t be learning at the undergraduate level.”

Moreno says that his background in economics has come in handy with his task of “data crunching and a lot of hard thinking about what the data is trying to tell [us].” Although he is planning on serving in the Army after graduating from CSU Dominguez Hills as part of his commitment to the CSU Dominguez Hills Army ROTC program, he looks forward to earning his doctorate after his service and working in one of the engineering disciplines.

“This will look good [on my resume] since I’ve been doing research,” he says, adding that with such divergent majors as physics and economics, Moreno says he is still keeping his career options open.

“With an [economics degree], someday he’ll be the person handing out the grants,” quips Lohmann.

Ganezer earned his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Master of Science degree and doctorate degrees in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also undertaking research in medical physics and in the past he was involved in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. Ganezer has also written extensively on particle physics, particle astrophysics, nuclear physics, medical physics, gravitational waves, supernovas, and gamma ray bursts.

- Joanie Harmon