The Experimental Neutrino Physics group at IFIC was founded in 1998 by Juan José Gómez-Cadenas, being Anselmo Cervera his PhD student at the time. The group has a strong international profile having participated in some of the major neutrino experiments worldwide: NOMAD (Switzerland), HARP (Switzerland), K2K (Japan), SciBooNE (USA), NEXT (Spain), T2K (Japan) and DUNE (USA). The group has actively contributed to some of the most important discoveries in experimental particle physics, as the discovery of neutrino masses, the only evidence so far of Physics Beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics. At present, the group is led by A. Cervera and M. Sorel (at IFIC since 2005), and has grown to a size of more than twenty scientists, engineers and students. The history of the group matches perfectly the golden age of neutrino physics, which has experienced during the last two decades the discovery of neutrino oscillations, probe of neutrino masses, and two Nobel Prizes in Physics (2002 and 2015).
During the last years the IFIC group has been devoted to the NEXT, T2K and DUNE international experiments, having made major contributions to all of them. Members of the group currently coordinate important working groups in these experiments, such as Physics Analysis in NEXT (M. Sorel, P. Novella), and Physics Beyond the Standard Model (J. Martín-Albo) and Calibration and Cryogenics Instrumentation (A. Cervera) in DUNE. Our contribution at the practical level is also remarkable. The IFIC neutrino group has developed extraordinary know-how in neutrino physics and its associated particle detectors. This has required collaboration with many research centres and various companies in the private sector, both national and international. In particular the IFIC group has actively participated in the R&D and construction of several TPCs, using noble elements (mainly argon and xenon) in both gas and liquid phases. We first collaborated in the TPC for the T2K near detector. Later we led the NEXT R&D programme with several TPC prototypes conducting to the NEXT-100 detector, being currently installed. We have also participated in the CERN prototype TPCs for the DUNE experiment. All three experiments are supported by large international collaborations and our research program is carried out in cooperation with other institutes at the national and international level.