April 23 (Friday) 1:10-2:10pm, LDC 104
The neutrino is the second most common particle in the Universe (after photons), by far more numerous that electrons, protons, and neutrons, yet it’s the least understood and most curious of the particles we know about. The MINOS experiment at the Soudan Underground Lab, and the NOvA experiment, under construction at Ash River, MN, are the current and the next generation of long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments. In his talk, Rik will demonstrate what neutrino flavor oscillation is, why neutrino “flavor” oscillation is even more curious than the flavor oscillation observed for other particles (!), that the apparent neutrino mass itself is curious on the femtoscopic scale of particle physics, and might also speak to the apparent matter-antimatter asymmetry in the
Universe on the cosmological scale. He will develop these topics in a context that highlights how a neutrino oscillation experiment works and what particle physics experimentalists do to accomplish such experiments.