Neutrinos and Mystery of Mass and Mixing

por Prof. Hirohisa Tanaka (University of British Columbia)

viernes 6 may. 2011 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Madrid

Salón de actos (Parc Científic)

As the stunningly successful Standard Model of elementary particles awaits its dénouement with the discovery of the Higgs boson, many vexing questions are left unanswered. What is the origin of the particle mass values and the mixing parameters which yield such a rich tapestry of quark and lepton behavior? Why should the range of masses extend over more than ten orders of magnitude? Why should the quarks and leptons exhibit such dramatically different mixing patterns? The Standard Model is silent on these issues. As we ponder these questions, searching for patterns that may hint on the fundamental workings, a worldwide program of experiments will allow us to appraise which conjectures remain tenable against a battery of increasingly precise measurements. I will discuss in detail one such experiment, T2K, in which an intense beam of muon neutrinos produced one side of Japan is sent to the Super Kamiokande experiment on the other side to provide high-sensitivity measurements of the lepton mixing parameters, and present its first results and future prospects.