Massive Neutrinos: What/how we know, what we do not know (yet?), and why we care
Colloquia
- Speaker
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Maria Concepción González García
Stony Brook University and ICREA - When
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2026/12/03
12:00 - Place
- DIPC Josebe-Olarra Lecture Hall
- Add to calendar
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iCal
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 was shaken by the observation of the quantum mechanical effect of lepton flavour oscillations which we know by now with no doubt that 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 our current understanding of neutrino masses from the observation of oscillations in different settings and the most basic construction to comprehensively account for these results, and what we are still missing in this picture. And may be I will speculate about some possible consequences of it all.
About the speaker
Prof M.C. Gonzalez-Garcia got her PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Valencia in 1991. She held postdoctoral positions at University of Wisconsin-Madison and as a fellow of the CERN Theory Division. As early as 1993 she obtained a tenured scientist position at the CSIC of which she took residency in 1996 at IFIC (a joint CSIC-University of Valencia institute) where eventually she was promoted to full Research Professor. In 2003 she joined the Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University as Associate Professor. She joined ICREA in the fall of 2006. She has written over 100 research papers on particle physics phenomenology, as well as some review articles. She is regularly invited to international meetings and conferences and she has given plenary talks at the most important conferences in her area.