Michael Schmidt (U Sydney) is currently a Cluster guest. His local contact person is Claudia Hagedorn (Cluster Research Fellow). Michael presents a Universe Lecture in three parts.
Abstract: Neutrinos are extremely weakly interacting particles, but have a large impact ondifferent physical processes, like beta decay and big bang nuclear synthesis.The discovery of neutrino oscillations by Super-Kamiokande in 1998 studyingatmospheric neutrinos and by SNO in 2001/2002 studying solar neutrinos led to alarge activity in neutrino physics culminating in this years Nobel prize. Thediscovery implies that neutrinos are massive and lepton flavour is notconserved clearly demonstrating the need for new physics beyond the StandardModel of particle physics. Today we know all three mixing angles in the leptonsector and that at least two neutrinos are massive. However severalquestions are not answered yet: Are neutrinos Dirac or Majorana particles? Whatis the origin of neutrino mass? What is the absolute neutrino mass scale? Whatis the mass ordering of neutrinos? Is there CP violation in the neutrino sector?
In this lecture series Michael will give an introduction to neutrino physics, outline what we currently know and discuss the open questions. The first two lectures (Dec 10+11) will give a broad overview of neutrino physics and the third lecture (Dec 14) will focus more specifically on a way to systematically understandthe generation of neutrino mass. We will discuss the experimental prospects to test neutrino mass generation in different experiments.
