Conveners
Invited talk - Goran Senjanović: The unbearable lightness of neutrino
- Mirko Planinic (University of Zagreb (HR))
Description
Neutrino is a mysterious elementary particle, incredibly light - its mass is more than billion times smaller than the proton mass, which gives mass to us all. The question of neutrino mass is directly connected to the fact that for centuries physicists held a deep belief that the fundamental laws of nature are left-right symmetric. However, in 1956 it came crushing down with a dramatic discovery that the so-called weak force is completely asymmetric, by acting only on left handed particles. But, what if the symmetry is only hidden, and not broken, in the subatomic world? This lecture is devoted to the Left-Right Symmetric Theory which predicted small neutrino mass decades before experimental verification. The question “is nature ambit-dexterous” is central in the elementary particle physics, and it led to the very Standard Model - the theory that describes today the world at the fundamental level. The answer to this question is is the key concept of prof. Senjanović’s theory and is the subject of experimental studies at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.