Joseph Formaggio
MIT
Friday, October
10, 2008
4:00 pm in SPL 57
“When going underground, remember the sunscreen…”
(What the sun has told us about neutrinos, and vice-versa.)
Abstract: The properties of neutrinos have been eluding scientists for over four decades. Making use of massive experiments buried deep underneath the Earth’s surface, experimentalists have shed light on the nature of this elusive particle by providing overwhelming evidence that neutrinos from the sun undergo oscillations –the quantum mechanical process by which a neutrino of one type spontaneously changes into another due to its mass. The talk will review the journey taken by physicists to learn about neutrinos and provide an outlook on how future experimental endeavors hope to reveal even more about neutrinos and neutrino mass.
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