Physical Society Colloquium

Neutrinos: from zeros to heroes?

Roxanne Guenette

Department of Physics
Harvard University

The Standard Model, that describes extremely well the particles and their interactions, predicts that neutrinos are massless and only interacts via weak interaction. These properties made neutrinos some of the least interesting particles of the model... until the discovery that they oscillate. This groundbreaking result implies that neutrinos are massive particles and opens the door to physics beyond the Standard Model - the holy grail of particle physicists. In addition, it seems that neutrinos could hold the key to many great mysteries of physics, such as the imbalance in the Universe between matter and anti-matter, and these are now within the reach of the next generation of neutrino experiments. After reviewing the intriguing properties of neutrinos, I will present the open questions in neutrino physics and describe how current and future neutrino experiments, focusing on Liquid Argon experiments, can bring new answers.