Today@Dal
» Go to news main"How to Tell a Neutrino from a Hole in the Ground"
Public lecture presented by Dr. Art B. McDonald, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario; Co-recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics and Dalhousie University Alumnus.
By creating an ultra-clean underground location with a highly reduced radioactive background, otherwise impossible measurements can be performed to study fundamental physics, astrophysics and cosmology. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) was a 1,000 tonne heavy-water-based neutrino detector created 2 km underground in a mine near Sudbury, Canada. SNO found clear evidence for neutrino flavor change that also requires that neutrinos have non-zero mass. This demands modification of the Standard Model for Elementary Particles and confirms solar model calculations with great accuracy.
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics and the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics were awarded for these measurements. Future measurements at the expanded SNOLAB underground science facility will search for Dark Matter particles thought to make up 26% of our Universe and rare forms of radioactivity that can tell us further fundamental properties of neutrinos potentially related to the origin of our matter-dominated Universe.
Monday, March 14th, 2016 at 7:00 PM
Ondaatje Hall, Dalhousie University
6135 University Avenue, McCain Building