Special Physics Seminar

Neutrinos - Harbingers of New Physics

Julian Heeck

UC Irvine

Neutrinos are the most elusive known elementary particles; they fly through all of us in vast numbers but are extremely difficult to detect. Immense progress has been made in analyzing their properties over the last decades, culminating in the surprising discovery of neutrino flavor oscillations. These neutrino oscillations imply that neutrinos have tiny but nonzero masses, which provides strong evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. With the increasing precision in neutrino measurements it has even become possible to use neutrinos as a tool to probe for further new physics, e.g. by studying how neutrinos scatter off electrons and nucleons. In addition, neutrinos could prove uniquely helpful in the search for dark matter and provide complementary information to standard indirect detection signatures.