Massive neutrinos: their nature and the values of their masses

by Silvia Pascoli (CERN PH-TH)

Friday 11 Mar 2005, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

The solar neutrino experiments Homestake, Kamiokande, SAGE, GALLEX/GNO, Super-Kamiokande (SK) and SNO, the data on atmospheric neutrinos obtained by the SK experiment and the results from the KamLAND reactor antineutrino experiment, provide very strong evidence for oscillations between flavour neutrinos. This phenomenon plays a crucial role in the understanding of neutrino properties, as it implies that neutrinos have mass and that they mix. As we know that neutrinos are massive, new questions are open for the future: what is the nature of neutrinos - whether they are Dirac or Majorana particles, what is the absolute neutrino mass scale and what is the type of neutrino mass hierarchy? I will discuss how these questions can be experimentally addressed in neutrino oscillation experiments, direct mass searches, neutrinoless double beta decay experiments and from cosmological observations.