VIRTUAL

 Thursday, January 20th    2022

3:45 – 4:45 pm (MT)

WEBEX 

 Speaker:  Julieta Gruszko

Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Physics and Astronomy

“Shedding `Nu' Light on the Nature of Matter: NuDot and the Search for Majorana Neutrinos”

 

Abstract: 

Why is the universe dominated by matter, and not antimatter? Neutrinos, with their changing  avors and tiny masses, could provide an answer. If the neutrino is its own antiparticle, it would reveal the origin of the neutrino's mass, demonstrate that lepton number is not a conserved symmetry of nature, and provide a path to leptogenesis in the early universe. To discover whether this is the case, we must search for neutrinoless double-beta decay. As the upcoming ton-scale generation of experiments is built, it is key that research and development (R&D) e orts continue to explore how to extend experimental sensitivities to e ective Majorana masses beyond 18 meV, corre- sponding to half-lives longer than   1028 years. These next-next-generation experiments could make a discovery, if neutrinoless double-beta decay is not found at the ton-scale, or o er insight into the mechanism behind lepton num- ber violation, if it is. NuDot is a proof-of-concept liquid scintillator experiment that will explore new techniques for isotope loading and background rejection in future detectors. I'll discuss the progress we've already made in demonstrating how previously-ignored Cherenkov light signals can help us distinguish signal from background, and the technologies we're developing with an eye towards the coming generations of experiments.

Bio:

Julieta's research focuses on the search for neutrinoless double-beta decay in Germanium-based experiments with the Majorana Demonstrator and LEGEND programs, and in next-next-generation liquid scintillator experiments with NuDot. Before arriving at UNC Chapel Hill in 2020, she was a Pappalardo Fellow at MIT and completed her PhD as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Washington. 

If you’d like more detail than that, there’s a longer version available at my website (https://jgruszko.web.unc.edu/people/) that you should feel free to draw from.