While neutrinos are some of the most abundant particles in the universe, they remain among the least understood. One of the biggest puzzles is their mass: although experiments have shown that neutrinos must have some mass, pinning down exactly how much has proven extraordinarily difficult.

Now, a team of physicists led by Valentina Tozzini of the Institute of Nanoscience in Pisa have published new theoretical calculations in Physical Review C, suggesting that tritium-infused graphene could give future experiments a decisive edge in measuring neutrino masses with unprecedented precision.