Particle Physics Seminar

Abstract:
Neutrinos, one of the most abundant yet elusive and mysterious elementary particles, hold the key to unraveling many fundamental open questions about our Universe such as why there is more matter than anti-matter in the Universe. Current and future accelerator-based neutrino facilities utilizing intense neutrino beams and advanced liquid-argon based neutrino detectors, such as short- (SBN program) and long-baseline (DUNE) neutrino experiments, are focused on precisely determining neutrino oscillation properties and signals of weakly interacting Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics. These are all subtle effects, such as extracting CP violation phase and disentangling parameter degeneracies between oscillation effects and Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics, and require an unprecedented higher level of precision in measurements. The potential of achieving discovery level precision and fully exploring the physics capabilities of these experiments relies greatly on the precision with which the fundamental underlying process – how does neutrino interact with the target material in the detector – is known. A non-trivial multi-scale, multi-process problem that lies in an uncharted territory that spans from low-energy nuclear physics to perturbative QCD with no known underlying unified physics. Therefore, multiple cross-community efforts are required to tackle such a problem and establish global constraints on neutrino-nucleus interaction physics that can enable desired precision in neutrino experiments.
In this talk, I will present some of the theoretical as well as experimental efforts that tackle this problem from different directions - microscopic nuclear many-body theory calculations of lepton-nucleus scattering, various nuclear effects in neutrino scatterings, electron and muon neutrino scattering differences, modern precise electron-nucleus scattering measurements at Jefferson lab, and prospects of neutrino-nucleus scattering measurements in neutrino experiments. I will then discuss the path forward in achieving global constraints on neutrino-nucleus interaction physics, enabling precision oscillation and BSM physics capabilities. I will also discuss low-energy neutrino physics, neutrinos from core-collapse supernova and stopped-pion sources, and present theory and simulation efforts of low-energy neutrino-nucleus interactions and current and future efforts of measuring them in neutrino experiments.