Unravelling the mysteries of neutrinos with neutrino-less double beta decay

David Sinclair (Carleton)

As evidenced by the award of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, neutrino properties are of great interest in science. We have learned from Super-K and SNO that neutrinos oscillate between flavour states and thus possess mass. This leads to deeper questions such as what is the actual mass of a neutrino, what mechanism gives them mass, and can the understanding of neutrino mass lead to an explanation for cosmological problems? In this talk I will provide the motivation for searching for a nuclear decay mode known as ‘Neutrino-less Double Beta Decay’ as the natural follow on to the oscillation discoveries. I will then describe the search for this decay mode in Xenon by the EXO collaboration, and our plans to extend the sensitivity of this search with a new detector at SNOLAB.

 Cette conférence s'adresse à tous, y compris les professeurs, les chercheurs et les étudiants des trois cycles. Le café est servi à partir de 11h30.