Introduction

I am one of the two physics fellows at Queen’s. I went to a large comprehensive school in North Yorkshire (Stokesley School, Stokesley) and then came to Oxford for my undergraduate degree (an MPhys at Balliol College). I really enjoyed learning physics, especially the particle physics options, so moved on to a DPhil in particle physics, where I studied particles called neutrinos (also in Oxford, at St. Cross College). After eight years in Oxford, I moved to the USA as a Lederman Fellow at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (the USA’s particle physics lab, located just outside Chicago) for four years. I returned to Oxford in 2021 as a UKRI Future Leader’s Fellow and Lecturer at Lincoln College, Oxford. I then took up my current position at Queen’s in 2024.

Teaching

I teach a range of topics to undergraduate students at Queen’s, including classical mechanics, special relativity, quantum mechanics, and nuclear and particle physics. I also typically supervise around three graduate (DPhil) students and two or three post-doctoral researchers.

Research

I am an experimental particle physicist, and my research is on particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are the most abundant massive particle in the universe, but they almost never interact with anything, which means it’s very hard to detect that they are even there. Neutrinos come in three types, or “flavours”, and the most interesting thing about them is that they can change between flavours. The big question in neutrino physics now is whether neutrinos and the antimatter version, antineutrinos, change in the same way – if they don’t, it could be a hint to why the universe is made only of matter, even though we think equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang. My research focuses on studying how neutrinos change and how they interact in detectors. I am a member of multiple international experimental collaborations: MicroBooNE (where I am Physics Coordinator, responsible for scientific leadership on the experiment), the Short Baseline Near Detector (SBND), T2K, and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).

If you’d like to know more, I host a YouTube series (created with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) about neutrino physics called “Even Bananas” (because everything creates neutrinos – the Sun, the Earth, and…even bananas!).

Publications

My publications are listed on the department website here: https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/duffy/publications