Edward Blucher

Edward Blucher is a particle physicist who studies an elusive particle called the neutrino. He formerly served as the co-spokesperson for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment or DUNE, an ambitious experiment to detect neutrinos sent 800 miles through the earth underground from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois to Sanford Underground Research Laboratory in South Dakota.

Blucher is also the former co-spokesperson of the Kaons at the Tevatron collaboration at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which in 1999 made the most definitive observation to date of the unbalanced decay of subatomic matter and anti-matter. This process, called direct charge-parity violation, may hold the key to understanding the very existence of matter in the universe.

In 2004, Blucher and his colleagues solved a 20-year-old puzzle regarding how some quarks interact in the beta decay of particles, a common form of radioactivity. Their work has helped to reinforce the scientific understanding of the weak nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature.