Hunting the Ghosts of Nuclear Power Plants

Speaker: 
Pedro Ochoa-Ricoux
Institution: 
UCI
Date: 
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Time: 
3:30 pm
Location: 
RH 101
Abstract: 
Despite the great progress achieved in the last two decades, neutrinos remain among the least understood fundamental particles to have been experimentally observed. As the most intense man-made sources of neutrinos ever built, nuclear reactors have provided an ideal ground to study these ghostly particles ever since their discovery in the late fifties. In this talk I will give an overview of the state of affairs in reactor neutrino physics with a focus on our work at UCI. I will review the latest results from Daya Bay, a mature and very successful experiment whose accolades include the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the discovery of a third type of neutrino oscillation. I will also present an overview of the JUNO experiment, which in 2021 will become the largest and most precise liquid scintillator neutrino detector ever constructed. I will end with a brief description of the tantalizing prospects for a novel neutrino detection technique that is inspired from the technology first developed for reactor antineutrino detection by Frederick Reines and his team.  
Host: 
Kevork Abazaijan
Tim Tait