Beyond the Standard Model with Neutrinos
Dr. Zahra Tabrizi
Northwestern University
Neutrinos were discovered more than 60 years ago, yet they are the most mysterious particles of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. Some of the neutrino properties can be explained through the current rich data of the neutrino experiments; however, there are still important unanswered questions which need to be clarified. In order to further explore the neutrino sector and answer these questions, next-generation, long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments are being built, including the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) in the United States. Given the intense neutrino beam, the massive far detector, and the envisaged scale of the near detector, DUNE will certainly offer a rich physics program. In this talk, I will first discuss how we can "directly" search for physics beyond the SM by directly producing the new particles at the neutrino experiments, and how we can use the potential of the DUNE-like experiments to explore the connections between neutrinos and other open questions of particle physics, including light dark matter, axion-like particles, etc. Secondly, I will demonstrate how to probe new physics at neutrino experiments "indirectly", within the Effective Field Theory framework. In this way, the analysis of the data can capture large classes of models, where the new degrees of freedom have masses well above the relevant energy for the experiment. Moreover, it allows us to compare several experiments in a unified framework and in a systematic way, where in this way the results from neutrino experiments can be connected with the results of other experiments, such as LHC.