The Parno Group

Experimental neutrino physics at Carnegie Mellon University

Welcome!

I am an experimental physicist at Carnegie Mellon University. I'm currently involved in three experiments: KATRIN (an effort in southwestern Germany to measure the absolute mass scale of the neutrino using tritium beta decay), COHERENT (an effort in Tennessee to precisely measure coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, or CEvNS, using several different types of detectors), and TRIMS (an effort in Seattle to test the molecular-physics theories that are used in extracting the final KATRIN result). Between these experiments, my group works on everything from simulation to detector design to operations to data analysis.

Recent Group News

  • Congratulations to Dr. Larisa Thorne for successfully defending her PhD thesis, modeling and fitting KATRIN spectra with CMKAT!
  • Dr Parno has been granted an Early Career Award to help build a D2O detector for the COHERENT experiment! See CMU writeup
  • KATRIN's new physics result from its second run: Check preprint here
  • COHERENT paper on plans for the D2O detector: Check preprint here
  • The KATRIN hardware paper has been accepted by JINST! Larisa is one of four main editors/authors on this gigantic effort. Check preprint here
  • The long paper on analysis methods for KATRIN's first neutrino-mass results has been accepted by PRD! Diana is one of two main authors on this paper. Check preprint here.
  • COHERENT's discovery of CEvNS on liquid argon has been accepted by PRL! Published paper here
  • TRIMS' first results are published in PRL! Here's the paper showing agreement with theory.