Past Event: Colloquium Outside of Equilibrium - David Moore - Yale University

Sizing up neutrinos: how do environmental interactions localize neutrinos emitted in nuclear decays?

Neutrinos remain among the most elusive of the known fundamental particles, due to the difficulty to detect their weak interactions with matter. Open questions related to neutrinos include understanding the mechanism by which they acquire their small masses, as well as whether neutrino properties may be relevant for explaining the generation of the matter/antimatter asymmetry in the early universe. I will briefly review the current knowledge of neutrinos and remaining questions about their fundamental properties, and then present an unresolved question that may become experimentally relevant in the near future: namely, how do the interactions of parent nuclei with their environment in a room-temperature solid material affect the coherence properties of neutrinos emitted in nuclear decays.

Host: XJ Xu