Physics Colloquium

Please note that coffee and cookies will be served at 3:00pm in the Physics Seminar Lounge.

Abstract: Neutrinos are some of the most fascinating particles that occur in nature. Over one billion times lighter than the proton, the neutrino was once thought to be massless and to travel at the speed of light. The Nobel-Prize winning discovery of neutrino oscillations demonstrated that neutrinos have non-zero mass, which opens up the unique possibility of the neutrino being its own antiparticle, known as a Majorana fermion. This property, combined with observations of CP violation, could help to explain the dominance of matter in our Universe. This talk will discuss the physics landscape, and present recent technological advances that enable a new kind of "hybrid" neutrino experiment, which would combine two highly successful detection techniques: the topological information of Cherenkov detectors, with the high light yield of scintillators. The Theia detector would be capable of combining both signals to achieve unprecedented levels of particle and event identification, offering a rich program of science across high-energy particle, nuclear and astrophysics.