IOP Vice-President for Business Dr John Martin Bagshaw CEng CPhys FInstP visits - Scotland

As part of our ongoing member engagement programme we invite you to join our IOP Vice-President for Business Dr John Martin Bagshaw CEng CPhys FInstP at the University of Glasgow on 25 June 2024.

Nobel Laureate Takaaki Kajita will talk about how the measurements of neutrinos and gravitational waves reveal much about our universe.  

Abstract.

Neutrinos are one of the fundamental subatomic particles. It has been assumed that neutrinos have no mass. However, it was predicted more than 50 years ago that, if neutrinos have mass, they will change their type (flavor) while propagating in the vacuum or in a medium. This phenomenon is called neutrino oscillations. Neutrino oscillations were discovered in 1998 and they are very important to understand the secrets of the Universe. In particular, neutrinos with very small mass may be the key for understanding the origin of matter in the Universe. Gravitational waves are generated by the violent motion of heavy masses. Therefore, gravitational waves are expected to be a very important new means for observing the Universe, such as binary blackhole mergers or binary neutron star mergers. In this talk, I will discuss experimental studies of neutrinos and gravitational waves and what they may say about the Universe we live in.