Physics & Astronomy Colloquium

Speaker: Philip Rodrigues

Title: Towards precision measurements of neutrino oscillations

Abstract: Neutrinos, the lightest massive particle in the Standard Model of
particle physics, have been studied experimentally for over 50 years,
yet many questions remain: What are the masses of the neutrinos, and why
are they so small? Is the neutrino its own antiparticle? Do neutrinos
violate charge-parity (CP) symmetry, and could such a violation relate
to the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe?

The study of neutrino flavor oscillations offers potential answers to
some of these questions, but requires precise theoretical and
experimental inputs, especially in the modeling of neutrino interactions
with the nuclei that make up our detectors. In this talk, I will
introduce some present and future neutrino oscillation experiments, and
present a new measurement, from the MINERvA experiment at Fermilab, of
the effect of the nuclear environment on neutrino-interaction cross
sections.

The colloquia will be preceded by light refreshments in GL227 from 3:30 – 3:45p.m.

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