Special Joint Lecture —Parity and the origin of (neutrino) mass: from Majorana to LHC and back

by Prof. Goran Senjanović

Wednesday 20 Nov 2019, 15:00 → 17:00 Asia/Shanghai

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

Abstract：

These lectures are devoted to the probe of the origin and nature of neutrino mass. I start by recalling how the maximal parity violation played a crucial role in making the SM a self-contained predictive theory of charged fermion masses and at the same time prevented neutrino from having a mass.

I then turn to the Left-Right symmetric theory that led to neutrino mass and to the seesaw mechanism behind its smallness. I cover the salient features of the Majorana mass concept from the effective point of view and its UV completions. I focus on the lepton number violation both in neutrinoless double beta decay and hadron collider production of the same sign charged lepton pairs accompanied by jets.

In short, it is shown that neutrino mass provides the door to new physics and that hadron colliders such as the LHC offer a hope of opening that door.

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.