Tom Stuttard: Neutrino oscillations and quantum gravity with IceCube

Friday 3 Feb 2023, 12:30 → 14:00 Europe/London

Niels Bohr Common Room (Schuster)

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, along with the more densely instrumented DeepCore sub-array, detects both atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos of all flavours across a huge range of energies (GeV to PeV), baselines (km to cosmological) and matter profiles. Although the observatory was originally designed to search for astrophysical neutrinos, during the last decade physicists have been increasingly exploiting this unique detector as a powerful particle physics laboratory. The vast detector size and copious atmospheric neutrino flux affords measurements of neutrino oscillations with statistical power far beyond dedicated accelerator experiments, whilst the high energy reach gives world-leading sensitivity to a range of BSM scenarios.

In this talk I will present new results from IceCube-DeepCore’s neutrino oscillation program using the latest 10 year datasets, and highlight the complementarity of these measurements with other global oscillation results. I will then show how searches for modified neutrino flavor transitions at high energies can probe a range of scenarios motivated by quantum gravity, providing rare experimental constraints on Planck scale physics. Finally, I will introduce the IceCube Upgrade program that will provide next-generation measurements in the next few years.

 

The seminar will be given in person in Niels Bohr, Schuster. 

Manchester_Feb2023_TomStuttard.pdf