Founded in 1872 as a land-grant institution, Virginia Tech is now a comprehensive, innovative research university with the largest number of degree offerings in Virginia. Virginia Tech's eight colleges are dedicated to putting knowledge to work through a combination of its three missions of teaching and learning, research and discovery, and outreach and engagement. Virginia Tech continually strives to accomplish the charge of its motto: Ut Prosim (That I May Serve). At its 2,600-acre main campus located in Blacksburg and off-campus educational facilities in six regions, Virginia Tech enrolls more than 31,000 full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries in 215 academic degree programs.
The Center for Neutrino Physics was founded in 2010 as a center in the Virginia Tech Department of Physics. The center members are all active researchers in the fields of particle and nuclear physics. Neutrinos are a major research direction for the Virginia Tech Physics Department.
In 1998 Bruce Vogelaar was hired at Virginia Tech, bringing with him an active research effort on solar neutrinos as part of the Borexino Collaboration. Prof. Vogelaar laid out a vision for a wide ranging neutrino initiative involving the development of an underground research facility at the Kimballton lime mine, the hire of a leading senior neutrino physicist, and the hire several junior faculty in neutrinos. In 2004, Raju Raghavan, the founder of Borexino, became the first hire in the initiative, bringing with him a leading role in the LENS experiment. In 2006, Prof. Jonathan Link joined the group contributing his research effort in sterile neutrinos (MiniBooNE) and reactor neutrinos (Daya Bay) to the initiative. Prof. Patrick Huber was hired into the group in 2008, bringing his expertise in neutrino phenomenology.
In addition to the various experimental and theoretical research initiatives of the center members, the Center for Neutrino Physics runs the underground lab known as the Kimballton Underground Research Facility, or KURF, as a resource for the wider neutrino and low-background research community. Today KURF is host to experiments and R&D efforts from several research groups.
The work of the center's members is not limited to neutrinos. It also includes e+e- collider physics at Belle and Belle II, electron scattering physics at JLab (G-zero and Qweak), and string theory.
