Zara Bagdasarian (UC Berkeley)

11:00am Friday December 8, 2023
Geoff Opat Seminar Room

Solar neutrinos overview and advances towards Theia multipurpose neutrino detector

Solar neutrinos have played a major historic role in the development of neutrino physics and understanding of the fusion processes in the Sun. Neutrino experiments worldwide continue to measure neutrinos originating in the core of the Sun in the search for new insights. Recent years have marked the discovery of the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen fusion cycle, tackling the Sun metallicity problem, and the search for physics beyond the Standard Model.

Furthermore, new developments in detection techniques and novel target materials, such as water-based liquid scintillator (WbLS), make it possible to expand the physics reach by utilizing both scintillation and Cherenkov signals in large-scale detectors. The multi-ktonne Theia design aims to detect solar neutrinos, determine neutrino mass ordering and the CP-violating phase, observe diffuse supernova neutrinos and neutrinos from a supernova burst, search for nucleon decay, and, ultimately, neutrinoless double beta decay. On the roadmap to Theia, the first deployment of Large Area Picosecond Photodetectors (LAPPDs) and WbLS in the ANNIE experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Eos detector at University of California, Berkeley are exciting milestones in the evolution of neutrino detection.