91̽��

'Neutrinos, the Universe, and Everything'

Guest speaker Professor Kirsty Duffy.

This is a public event, everyone is welcome. Under 16 year olds must be accompanied by a responsible adult.

Why does the Universe exist? We believe that the Big Bang created matter and its opposite – antimatter – in equal amounts, and we know experimentally that when matter and antimatter come together, they destroy each other in a burst of energy. So why hasn’t that happened? This is one of the most fundamental questions we have about nature, and answers might be found in an unexpected place: subatomic particles called neutrinos.

Neutrinos are the most important particle you were never taught about. They are created in radioactive decays in the sun, the centre of the Earth, supernovae, and even beer. Around 100 billion pass through your thumbnail every second, but you’ve probably never noticed. In this talk, particle physicist Kirsty Duffy will explain what neutrinos are, why they are so interesting to particle physicists, how they might explain why the universe exists, and the mega-science experiments being built to find out.

Kirsty will draw on her work on DUNE, The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, a next-generation experiment using leading-edge multi-kiloton liquid argon detectors, which is due to turn on towards the end of the decade. It will make measurements of neutrinos with unprecedented precision, and may hold the key to answering some of the most fundamental questions in physics.

Kirsty Duffy is a particle physicist studying neutrinos, a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, and an Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at The Queen’s College, 91̽��. As physics lead for the international MicroBooNE collaboration, she leads a team of around 190 scientists studying properties of neutrinos and looking for signs of new physics using a liquid argon-based detector at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the USA. With colleagues in the UK and internationally, she is working to develop the next-generation Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, which will make the world’s most precise measurements of these elusive particles, and hopefully shed light on some of the most fundamental questions in physics. She also hosts the popular YouTube series “Even Bananas” about neutrino physics, in collaboration with Fermilab.