Concepcion Gonzalez-Garcia

C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stony Brook University, and ICREA, Universitat de Barcelona

Massive neutrinos? how we know and why we care

Neutrinos hold a special place in particle physics. They were the first particles to be postulated, before they were actually detected, on the basis of a conservation law of Physics. In the Standard Model -- the seemingly theory of everything that happens to elementary particles -- they were entrusted with the conservation of each of the lepton flavours and of the total number of leptons in the Universe. They did so by keeping themselves massless. A beautiful construction which has been shaken by the observation of the quantum mechanical effect of lepton flavour oscillations which by now we have no doubt are due to neutrino being massive if very light, implying the need of revisiting the Standard Model. In this talk I will walk through the arguments behind the statements above. I will describe the evidence of neutrino masses from the observation of oscillations in different settings, and our most basic understanding of these results. I will speculate about the possible meaning of it all.



Concepcion Gonzalez-Garcia is a Spanish theoretical physicist and a professor at the ICREA Dep. de Fisica Quantica i Astrofisica, Universitat de Barcelona and the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University. (more information)