Neutrinos: Behind and Beyond the Standard Model – Overview

Note: Due to the current Coronavirus Crisis the lecture will be held online, until further notice. See here for more details.

Office hours:

Wednesday 14:00, via "Zoom".

Course description:

The Standard Model of particle physics is a high precision extremely successful theory. It has only one failure: it predicts a massless neutrino. The origin of the neutrino mass is thus arguably the main door into physics Beyond the Standard Model. My central message is that the hadron colliders such as the LHC could open this door.

The aim of this course is to take a student on the road towards probing not just the origin, but also the nature of the neutrino mass. In order to be pedagogical and get a deeper feeling for the issues involved, we start from the beginning: the birth of neutrino, the Fermi theory behind it, the neutrino discovery and the culmination with the V-A theory that paved the road to the Standard Model.

It will be shown that the essence in all of this is maximal parity violation in weak interactions, and that understanding its origin is crucial for untangling the mystery of the neutrino mass. We will show how the spontaneous breakdown of an otherwise perfectly symmetric world leads to a self-contained, predictive theory of neutrino mass.

Ideally the students should know about the Standard Model, but this is not a prerequisite. The first part of the course will be behind - or better to say, below - the Standard Model, where we discuss the nature of mass in general and the physics of weak interactions. By the time Prof. Dvali covers the essence of the Higgs mechanism and the Standard Model physics, we will be equipped with enough tools to go beyond.

This course is complementary to the ''QCD and Standard Model course''.

Outline of the course:

I. Some history. Why neutrino and how to observe it?

II. Effective Theory of Weak Interaction. From Fermi to V-A & Parity violation

III. Towards Fundamental Theory. W boson - analogy with the photon

IV. Nature of neutrino mass: Dirac vs Majorana

V. Standard Model and the Origin of charged fermion masses

VI. Parity Violation and the Standard Model

VII. Left-Right Symmetric Theory and the Origin of Neutrino Mass

References:

• Fundamentals of Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics - C. Giunti, C. W. Kim
• Massive neutrinos in physics and astrophysics - R.N. Mohapatra, P.B. Pal
• Quarks and Leptons: An Introductory Course in Modern Particle Physics - F. Halzen, A. Martin
• Concepts of Elementary Particle Physics - M. Peskin
• Leptons and Quarks - L. Okun
• Lie Algebras in Particle Physics - H. Georgi
• Neutrino - F. Close