Colloquium: Dr. Blair Jamieson

Fri. Jan. 18 12:30 PM - Fri. Jan. 18 01:20 PM
Location: 3M62

Dr. Blair Jamieson

Associate Professor, Physics 
The University of Winnipeg

 

What Have We Learned About Neutrinos, and What is Left to Learn

Neutrinos are an interesting particle to study.  They interact so weakly that they can travel through a light year of lead before interacting.  Despite this property, using very large detectors, and very large neutrino fluxes, we are able to measure their properties.  During my sabbatical I traveled to, and helped refurbish the 40 m high, 39 m diameter Super-Kamiokande (SK) detector, located 1 km under a mountain in Japan.  The goals of the next phase of SK are varied, and include a search for Charge Parity violation in neutrinos using a beam of neutrinos from the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) in the Tokai to Kamika (T2K) experiment, as well as from neutrinos produced by cosmic rays in the atmosphere.  In addition, the next phase of SK will include improved neutron tagging allowing the separation of neutrino from anti-neutrino interactions.  In this talk I will give a brief review of neutrino physics, and some of the interesting phenomenolgy that results. I will discuss the future neutrino physics program in Japan, which includes separate experiments aimed at reducing systematic uncertainties in neutrino oscillation measurements, and the Hyper-Kamiokande detector, which will be about ten times larger than SK that will begin construction in 2020.