Mubasshir Khan

I am a PhD candidate in Physics working in experimental medium energy physics under the supervision of Dr. Chris Crawford. 

For most of time as a graduate student I have been working on neutron–mirror neutron oscillation experiments conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This work is partly motivated by the long-standing discrepancy between two experimental approaches used to measure the neutron lifetime: the beam and bottle method and they differ by approximately 4σ. For something that is a fundamental property of a subatomic particle, it should not depend on how you measure it. This tension has prompted investigations into possible systematic effects as well as new physics scenarios, including neutron oscillations into mirror-sector states. Know more here: https://www.ornl.gov/publication/experimental-search-neutron-mirror-neutron-oscillations-explanation-neutron-lifetime

The second project I am currently working on is Project 8, a precision experiment aimed at measuring the absolute neutrino mass scale through direct kinematic methods. The experiment uses Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy (CRES), in which the energy of beta decay electrons is inferred from the frequency of the cyclotron radiation they emit in a magnetic field. By precisely measuring the shape of the electron energy spectrum near the endpoint of tritium beta decay, the experiment constrains the effective electron neutrino mass. Know more here: https://www.project8.org/

And when I am not doing physics, I like to work on Avionics and Control Systems in the engineering group SpaceLex (https://spacelex.engr.uky.edu/meet-team).