- July 14, 2017, 8:00 pm US/Central
- Fermilab Ramsey Auditorium
- Dr. Joe Lykken, Chief Research Officer, Fermilab
- Tickets: $7
- Purchase tickets »
Neutrinos are the oddballs of elementary particles, and their peculiar properties suggest connections to many of the big mysteries of particle physics. Enrico Fermi was the first to propose a way to detect them and to officially bestow their name. The story of Fermi’s “little neutral ones” has already many surprises and inspiring examples of daring experimental initiative.
Today a host of new experiments are trying to unlock the secrets of these elusive particles. Most ambitious is the proposed Long Baseline Neutrino Facility at Fermilab, which will send neutrinos 800 miles through the Earth to 70,000 tons of liquid argon detectors located a mile underground in South Dakota. The detectors will be built and operated by a newly formed scientific collaboration called DUNE (for Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment), a global effort of 150 universities and labs from 30 countries. This lecture will help the audience understand why so many physicists are betting their own futures on neutrinos, and how discoveries from DUNE could change our understanding of how the universe works.
Joe Lykken has worked at Fermilab as a theoretical physicist since 1989, and has acted as Fermilab’s deputy director for research and chief research officer since 2014. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is known for theoretical research in a variety of areas including supersymmetry, superstrings, and extra dimensions. He is a member of the CMS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where he worked on searches for supersymmetry and on the characterization of the properties of the newly discovered Higgs boson.
