1. Physics Colloquium

    "Changing Flavor: the Universe's Weirdest Particle"

    Presented by Kirsty Duffy - Leona Woods Award Winner, FNAL

    Tuesday, November 5, 2019, 3:30 pm
    Large Seminar Room, Bldg. 510

    Neutrinos are some of the most abundant–but elusive–constituents of matter in the universe. It has been firmly established that neutrinos can change flavor (or "oscillate"), as recognized by the 2015 Nobel Prize, and in recent years the field has moved beyond the "discovery" phase to focus on precise measurements of the parameters that determine neutrino oscillation. As our understanding improves, it opens doors to new discoveries about the nature of this little-understood particle. This is a very exciting time in neutrino physics there exists a wealth of fascinating questions to investigate, including recent tantalizing hints of large neutrino-sector CP violation, and we are rapidly developing the tools to answer them. As the United States HEP community leads the next generation of neutrino oscillation experiments, I will give an overview of the field: from the initial discovery of the neutrino, to the first evidence for oscillation, to the most recent results from current long-baseline oscillation experiments such as T2K and NOvA. I will finish by discussing the exciting future prospect of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment and the liquid argon time projection chamber technology that makes it possible, including recent results and examples from my own work on MicroBooNE, a liquid argon neutrino detector currently taking data at Fermilab