Thursday, December 11, 2014, 16:00
Auditorium
Nicola Serra, U. of Zurich
Abstract:
Right-handed (also known as sterile) neutrinos are the most natural way to give mass of Standard Model neutrinos via Yukawa couplings. It is well known that if sterile neutrinos have a relatively large Majorana mass term, they can explain the smallness of active neutrino masses via the seesaw mechanism.
In addition, it has been shown that sterile neutrinos with Majorana masses below the electroweak scale can explain the baryon-antibaryon asymmetry in the Universe via leptogenesis. If the lightest of these sterile neutrinos is very weakly coupled, with a lifetime much longer than the age of the Universe, it is an excellent candidate for warm Dark Matter.
I will described current searches for sterile neutrinos below the electroweak scale and opportunities at future facilities. In particular, I will concentrate on the SHiP (Search for Hidden Particles) experiment, which is a proposed new fixed target experiment at the SPS of CERN.