Dancing Neutrinos, Prof Seon-Hee Seo (Seoul National University)

Thursday Oct 16, 2014, 3:15 PM → 4:45 PM Pacific/Honolulu

112 (Watanabe Hall)

Neutrinos are the most mysterious among the fundamental particles in our universe even though they are the second most abundant. Neutrinos were postulated by Pauli in 1930 and the discovery of neutrinos was finally achieved using reactors by Reines and Cowan in 1956. We now know that there are three active flavors (or families) of neutrinos (nu_e, nu_mu, nu_tau) and they like to mix while traveling. As a result they can change their flavors as in a magic show. This is possible because the neutrinos have mass and even though the masses are very tiny the mass eigenstates are very different from the flavor eigenstates. In this talk I will introduce the neutrinos and related oscillation experiments, and some interesting questions/challenges remaining in neutrino physics. (N.B. This talk should be accessible to UH physicists in all sub-fields)

Slides Seo_Hawaii_Colloquium_2014.pdf