Friday, Feb 17, 2006

George Fuller, Dept of Physics and Astronomy, UCSD

"Neutrinos: Nature's Stealthy Agents of Disorder and Creation"

2:00 pm in room P-148

Abstract: You may have heard that individual neutrinos are ghostlike and can pass through light-years of lead, so it may come as a surprise that we believe they are responsible for much of the heavy lifting in astrophysical environments like the early universe and the gravitational collapse of massive stars. Neutrinos more than make up for their feeble individual interactions with huge numbers. They transport energy and lepton number through dense matter into lower density regimes where nuclei are formed. As a result, macroscopic processes like the creation of the light elements in the Big Bang or the creation of the heaviest elements like uranium in supernova explosions could be sensitive to the properties of the neutrinos. We will discuss what we know about neutrinos and explore aspects of how they influence/engineer disorder and creation in the cosmos.