Lu, Xianguo 卢显国 | Elementary Particle Physics Group
Associate Professor (CVLink opens in a new window)
Particle physics explores the basic building blocks of the world—the particles and forces that make up everything we see. By the time the Higgs boson was discovered, we believed we understood these constituents fairly well, yet we had only just begun to truly understand neutrinos—one of the most common yet most elusive particles in nature, which can be seen as the charge-neutral counterpart of electrons. Among the few deep questions now emerging is how mass is “distributed” among the different types of neutrinos. My research focuses on studying these particles through detector design, simulation, and data analysis, aiming to uncover how neutrinos behave and what they can reveal about the universe.
Outside of academia, I am a regular runner, having logged 620 kilometres in 2025. Been there, done that: East Lake, Wuhan (武汉东湖, 13k); Neckar River, Heidelberg (7k); Danube River, Bratislava (5k); Garonne River, Bordeaux (7k); Weiming Lake, Peking University (北大未名湖, 5k); Venice (5k); Central Park, New York (12k); and Lake Senba, Mito (水戸市千波湖, 10k).
Lectures
- Warwick PX454: Theoretical Particle Physics, Part One: Introduction to Quantum Field Theory [lecture notes (2 MB )], 2024-2026
- Accelerator and Atmospheric Neutrinos, The 2nd JUNO Neutrino Summer SchoolLink opens in a new window, Hangzhou, August 2025
- The Maximum Likelihood Estimation Method, HERMES DVCS Week, Hamburg, September 2007 (0.5 MBLink opens in a new window )
Research Focus
Transverse Kinematic Imbalance (TKI)
Since 2015, I have been developing Transverse Kinematic Imbalance (TKI) as a way to study neutrino interactions with atomic nuclei. Because the energy of an incoming neutrino is not known event by event, TKI focuses first on momentum balance transverse to the neutrino beam, where this uncertainty can be largely avoided. The resulting imbalance provides a direct window onto the motion of nucleons inside the nucleus, interactions of outgoing particles as they pass through nuclear matter, and other many-body effects. Over the past decade, the approach has grown into a broader family of methods, including longitudinal and three-dimensional extensions (TKI+) and left–right asymmetries (TKI−), and has been applied across different experiments, beam energies, nuclear targets and reaction channels. TKI can also isolate neutrino interactions on hydrogen, providing a clean view of the underlying interaction without nuclear effects. A recent overview of the development and current landscape of TKI is available in my NuWro Workshop 2026 presentationLink opens in a new window (5 MBLink opens in a new window , 22 MBLink opens in a new window ).
Visualising Neutrino Oscillations: VISOS and VISOSim
Neutrino oscillation is inherently a quantum-mechanical phenomenon, but it can also be visualised in a surprisingly intuitive way. I initiated VISOS (VISualisation of OScillation) to represent the three neutrino flavours as a triangular probability space: as a neutrino travels, its changing probabilities of being an electron, muon or tau neutrino trace out a trajectory within this triangle. This makes otherwise abstract features—such as the difference between neutrino and antineutrino oscillations arising from CP violation, or the effects of neutrino energy, propagation distance and matter—directly visible. VISOSim turns the idea into an interactive tool: users can explore examples based on experiments such as T2K, DUNE, JUNO and KamLAND, or vary the oscillation parameters themselves and immediately see how the trajectory changes. The project therefore serves both as an outreach tool for understanding neutrino oscillations and a visual aid for exploring oscillation physics.
VISOSLink opens in a new window (VISualisation of OScillation)
Write to:
Contact Details:
Office: H1.19