Wednesday 12 April 2017 

Speaker: Dr Edward Leming (University of Oxford)


Title: "The hunt for neutrinoless double beta decay with the SNO+ experiment”

Abstract: Neutrinoless double beta decay is a long sought-after process which may occur in certain nuclei if neutrinos have mass and are their own anti-particles; observing it could shed light on the neutrino masses themselves, as well as fundamental questions such as the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe and the energy scale of physics beyond the Standard Model. Currently taking water background data, the SNO+ experiment re-purposes the (2015 nobel prize winning) SNO detector to join the community of experiments chasing down this extremely rare process, deploying a large mass of Tellurium in liquid scintillator approximately 2 km underground near Sudbury, Canada. In this seminar I will give a general introduction to neutrinoless double beta decay, and describe the SNO+ detector, prospects and projected sensitivities.