Lecture

Dark matter: Heavy neutrinos

Graph Chat

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

In course

PHYS-416: Particle physics II

This course aims to make students familiar and comfortable with the main concepts of particle physics, providing a clear connection between the theory and relevant experimental results, including the most recent ones from modern particle physics experiment ...

Description

This lecture explores the seesaw mechanism, an unconfirmed hypothesis aiming to prove experimentally that neutrinos are Majorana particles. It discusses the Majorana mass term, the physical masses obtained after matrix diagonalization, and the implications of heavy neutrinos in the standard model of particle physics.

Instructor

Lesya Shchutska

Current Work Our research is focused on testing the boundaries of the Standard Model of particle physics and on looking for new phenomena which might explain unanswered puzzles in the fundamental description of the Universe. The examples of such puzzles would be dark matter nature, matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe or very small but non-zero neutrino masses.The main instrument for these tasks is the LHCb detector at CERN, where the analyses of the data collected in the LHC proton-proton collisions

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Physics

Particle physics: Standard Model

Related concepts (32)

Sterile neutrino

Sterile neutrinos (or inert neutrinos) are hypothetical particles (neutral leptons – neutrinos) that are believed to interact only via gravity and not via any of the other fundamental interactions of the Standard Model. The term sterile neutrino is used to distinguish them from the known, ordinary active neutrinos in the Standard Model, which carry an isospin charge of ± 1/ 2 and engage in the weak interaction. The term typically refers to neutrinos with right-handed chirality (see right-handed neutrino), which may be inserted into the Standard Model.

Neutrino

A neutrino (njuːˈtriːnoʊ ; denoted by the Greek letter ν) is a fermion (an elementary particle with spin of 1 /2) that interacts only via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass is so small (-ino) that it was long thought to be zero. The rest mass of the neutrino is much smaller than that of the other known elementary particles excluding massless particles.

Neutrino oscillation

Neutrino oscillation is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which a neutrino created with a specific lepton family number ("lepton flavor": electron, muon, or tau) can later be measured to have a different lepton family number. The probability of measuring a particular flavor for a neutrino varies between three known states, as it propagates through space. First predicted by Bruno Pontecorvo in 1957, neutrino oscillation has since been observed by a multitude of experiments in several different contexts.

Particle physics

Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) and bosons (force-carrying particles). There are three generations of fermions, although ordinary matter is made only from the first fermion generation. The first generation consists of up and down quarks which form protons and neutrons, and electrons and electron neutrinos.

Neutrino astronomy

Neutrino astronomy is the branch of astronomy that observes astronomical objects with neutrino detectors in special observatories. Neutrinos are created as a result of certain types of radioactive decay, nuclear reactions such as those that take place in the Sun or high energy astrophysical phenomena, in nuclear reactors, or when cosmic rays hit atoms in the atmosphere. Neutrinos rarely interact with matter, meaning that it is unlikely for them to scatter along their trajectory, unlike photons.

Related lectures (64)

The weak interactions of leptons

Delves into neutrino flavors, muon decay, LFU violation, and neutrino-quark scattering, exploring weak interactions of leptons.

Cosmological Constraints on Neutrino Masses

Explores Boltzmann H-theorem, entropy conservation, neutrino freezing, nucleosynthesis, and cosmological constraints.

Particle Physics: Fundamentals and Interactions

Covers the basics of particle physics, including elementary particles, forces, the Standard Model, and rare phenomena at the LHC.

Higgs boson; Dark matter

Explores the properties of the Higgs boson and the concept of dark matter, including detection strategies and challenges.

Overview of Particle Physics and Rutherford Scattering