Neutrino: chronicles of an aloof witness

by Prof. Goran Senianovic

Tuesday 19 Nov 2019, 15:00 → 16:00 Asia/Shanghai

300-02 (Tsung-Dao Lee Institute (East wing of Pao Yue-Kong Library))

Abstract: 

 

As you read this, trillions of neutrinos from the sun are passing through every square cm of your body, doing no harm whatsoever. They convey information from the depth of the universe and have been present from its very birth. Neutrinos have captured the imagination of physicists from the time they were first conceived and have repeatedly provided a window into new physics.

 

A question stood out for decades: Are neutrinos massive like their seemingly inseparable electron siblings? It took almost seventy years to obtain the positive answer. I review here past and present efforts to probe the origin of neutrino mass and show that this is deeply related to the fundamental question of left-right symmetry in nature. This ongoing story will take us from the beginnings of elementary particle physics all the way to the frontiers of the Large Hadron Collider.  

Biography:

Goran Senjanović is a theoretical physicist at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. He received his Ph.D at the City College of New York in 1978. Collaborated with Rabindra Mohapatra, he invented mechanism of spontaneous parity violation when he was a graduate student. He is also one of the fathers of the seesaw mechanism. Before joining ICTP in 1991, he worked as a staff member at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and as a professor of physics at the University of Zagreb. His major research interests are neutrino physics, unification of elementary particle forces, baryon and lepton number violation and supersymmetry.

TDLI. 2019key.pdf