Neutrino Mixing and the Daya Bay Experiment

Monday, November 19, 2012 at 4:00pm

Rockefeller Hall, Schwartz Auditorium Central Campus

Physics Colloquium, Lisa Whitehead, University of Houston. Refreshments at 3:30pm.

Abstract: Experimental observations have established that neutrinos undergo flavor oscillations as they propagate due to quantum mechanical mixing between the mass states and flavor states. The Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment has recently observed the disappearance of electron-type antineutrinos from nuclear reactor cores at the Daya Bay Power Plant located in China. This observation allowed Daya Bay to make a measurement of the last neutrino mixing angle, 13, which was previously only known to be small in comparison to the other neutrino mixing angles. In this talk, I will discuss the experimental evidence for neutrino oscillations and describe the recent results from Daya Bay.