Nuclear, Particle, Astroparticle and Cosmology (NUPAC) Seminars
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics: Discovery of Neutrino Oscillations at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
Presented by Keith Rielage, LANL
Dr. Arthur McDonald, the Director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), was awarded the 2015 Nobel Physics Prize jointly with Dr. Takaaki Kajita, for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which show that neutrinos have mass. This talk will focus on the SNO experiment and its exciting results. The SNO experiment operated from 1999 to 2006 and measured the solar neutrino flux using three methods. The detector was composed of 1000 tons of heavy water surrounded by almost 10,000 photomultiplier tubes. Cherenkov light was detected from both elastic scattering and charged current interactions of the neutrinos with the heavy water providing a measurement of the electron neutrino flux. In addition, SNO could detect the neutron liberated in neutral current interactions that is sensitive to all three flavors of neutrinos. This unique capability definitively showed that neutrinos, which started as electron neutrinos in the sun, could oscillate to other neutrino flavors before arriving at Earth. The discovery that neutrinos have mass was not predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics and has spawned a huge effort in the physics community to study the properties of the neutrino.
2:00 pm, Tuesday, October 27, 2015
PAIS-2540, PAIS
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A schedule of talks within the Department of Physics and Astronomy is available on the P&A web site at http://physics.unm.edu/pandaweb/events/index.php