© Pint of Science, 2024. All rights reserved.
A big night all about the smallest things in the universe - fundamental particles! Hear about how we can measure the mass of something so small we once thought it weighed nothing, and how our models of the universe may not actually be correct...
Weighing the neutrino
Professor Jonathan Tennyson
(Massey Professor of Physics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCL and Fellow of The Royal Society)
Neutrinos are the most abundant particles in the universe and also the most mysterious. They were long thought to be massless; it is now known that they do have some mass but are the lightest known particle. The talk will discsuss our attempts to determine the mass of the neutrino (or rather the masses of three flavours of neutrinos) both by doing laboratory measurements and by considering their role in the cosmos as a whole.
What do you get when you take 2 away from g?
Professor Gavin Hesketh
(Professor of Physics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCL)
Gavin will explain the results from the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab, USA. These measurements hit international headlines in 2021 and again in 2023, as they seem to show that the Standard Model - our current understanding of the universe on the smallest scales - is wrong. This could be what researchers have sought for decades: the first sign of a major discovery and breakthrough in our understanding of the universe. But will the Standard Model be proven right as always? Gavin will explain how the experiment works, and what the results mean.
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