Deborah Harris Colloquium

Fri. Nov. 10 12:30 PM - Fri. Nov. 10 01:20 PM
Location: 3M69 & via Zoom

Join us in 3M69 to tune in virtually to hear Deborah Harris who will be giving a talk in-person at the University of Manitoba.

Interference Patterns with Neutrinos  

Neutrinos are fascinating particles because they were created less than a second after the Big Bang and hence are one of the few particles to provide a window into the creation of the universe.  There are now a billion times more neutrinos than the particles that make up normal matter, yet we know little about neutrinos because they rarely interact.  We know neutrinos come in three different kinds, and they transform (or oscillate) from one kind to another (a discovery that received the 2015 Physics Nobel Prize).  The fact that neutrinos oscillate means that we can learn a great deal about them by studying what are effectively interference patterns that arise after neutrinos made in a laboratory propagate over hundreds of kilometers.  To do that though we need to build enormous detectors, very intense neutrino beams, and to learn more than ever about the way neutrinos interact in matter.  This talk will present the current status of neutrino oscillation measurements and how we are preparing for the next generation of measurements, in particular the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.  

BIO: Dr. Deborah Harris's current research interest is in the field of neutrino interactions and oscillations.  Her work at Fermilab began with NuMI, the neutrino source for several neutrino experiments at Fermilab.  After working on two neutrino oscillation experiments she realized that both of them would need a better understanding of neutrino interactions in order to fully exploit the planned statistics of the expected data sets. Deborah is currently the co-spokesperson of MINERvA, an experiment whose goal is to measure neutrino interactions on a variety of different nuclei with unprecedented accuracy. In July 2019 Deborah started as a joint appointment with Fermilab and York University in Toronto, Canada, where she works on the DUNE experiment, which will bring a new era of precision neutrino oscillation measurements.  Deborah received her A.B. in Physics from University of California-Berkeley, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in High-Energy Physics from the University of Chicago.  She was appointed as a Research Associate at the University of Rochester for five years, and started working at Fermilab as a staff scientist in 1999.  Dr. Harris served as the Project Manager for MINERvA from 2005 through the project's completion in 2010.