Global Times Chinese edition reported that experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences used this year's Nobel Prize in Physics as an occasion to describe the state of neutrino research. The JUNO experiment has run for over a year and published its first result in Nature in June.
Huanqiu.com, the Chinese-language Global Times site, compiled comments from several experts at the CAS Institute of High Energy Physics and Institute of Modern Physics on where neutrino research stands. The occasion was this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. According to the report, the prize went to Francis Halzen for contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos.
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The experts said neutrinos carry no charge, have tiny mass and barely interact with matter, hence the nickname. IceCube sits 1,450 to 2,450 meters under Antarctic ice, with 5,160 optical modules on 86 strings watching about one cubic kilometer for TeV-to-PeV astrophysical neutrinos. JUNO lies underground about 52.5 kilometers from the Yangjiang and Taishan nuclear plants and measures reactor electron antineutrinos at MeV energies.
Led by the Institute of High Energy Physics, JUNO completed filling 20,000 tons of liquid scintillator on August 26, 2025 and began taking data, running stably for more than a year, Huanqiu said. Around 700 researchers from 74 institutions in 17 countries and regions take part. In June, a first result based on 59 days of data made the cover of Nature, improving the precision of two key oscillation parameters 1.6-fold over the combination of earlier experiments; another result that month, using 207 days, favored the normal mass ordering at 2.1 standard deviations.
Complementary, not rivals, and what comes next
IHEP researcher He Miao said IceCube and JUNO are complementary rather than competing, with room to cooperate on mass ordering, supernova early warning and cross-checks. Researcher Yu Zeyuan listed future directions: JUNO's mass-ordering measurement, geo and astrophysical neutrinos, neutrinoless double beta decay and high-energy neutrino astronomy.
Yu also mentioned domestic work on underwater high-energy neutrino detection technology. A 2.1-sigma result falls short of the usual discovery threshold, so more data are needed. This paper could not check the experts' remarks beyond the Huanqiu report.