Coast to Coast Seminar Series: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being (A Neutrino)"

Abstract

If you took an electron and stripped away all of its charge and all of its mass, would you have anything left? Incredibly enough, the answer is yes---a neutrino! Invented originally as an "accounting trick" to balance the books in nuclear reactions, we now know neutrinos to be among the lightest and hardest to detect particles in the world. Billions of them are flying through your body as you read this abstract. I will explain what we know about these phantom-like particles and the unique challenges we face in studying their properties.