"Chasing the Neutrino Mass."

  • Date: Dec 20, 2011
  • Time: 12:30 PM - 12:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Prof. Dr. Ernst-Wilhelm Otten, Universität Mainz
  • Room: Herbert Walther Lecture Hall
  • Host: MPQ
In the thirties of the last century Pauli and Fermi had solved the apparent violation of conservation laws in nuclear beta-decay by introducing a so far undetected, weakly interacting, neutral, and practically mass less particle – the neutrino. Twenty years later Reines finally could detect this missing particle in beta-decay by experiment. The further exploration of neutrino properties and interactions revealed great discoveries and surprises: parity violation, the existence of three neutrino flavours, and finally, at the turn of the century, the oscillation between neutrino flavours by superposition of three mass eigenstates with tiny mass differences. But the question about the absolute neutrino mass is still open. The experimental part of the talk will focus on the neutrino mass searches based on terrestrial experiments within the KATRIN collaboration at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe.
Go to Editor View