Measuring the Elusive: How to Catch Neutrinos and What They Tell Us about the Universe

Speaker:

Mayly Sanchez

06 Apr 2015

8:00 PM

Sun Room, Memorial Union

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Mayly Sanchez is an experimental particle physicist at Iowa State whose research may help answer one of the most fundamental questions in nature: Why is the universe dominated by matter and not anti-matter? Her research focuses on measuring the properties of neutrinos, subatomic particles that rarely interact with matter and have the unique ability to change identities. Sanchez earned a PhD in physics from Tufts University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a staff scientist at Argonne National Laboratory before joining the faculty at Iowa State. She has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant and recognized with a Presidential Early Career Award for her work on the application of new photodetector technologies to particle physics. College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean's Lecture Series

Neutrinos remain the least understood building block of matter. They have no electrical charge, their mass is vanishingly small and they interact only through the weakest of forces. As they travel unhindered through miles and miles of matter, neutrinos pull off a special trick: they change from one type to another. This odd identity swap is what allows physicists to reveal the properties of these secretive particles: but they have to be caught first. Mayly Sanchez will discuss the challenges of observing the elusive neutrinos, what they might tell us about the universe and how this quest might jump-start future technological advances.