Events

Christopher Tully is an experimental particle physicist at Princeton University, where he leads the PTOLEMY project in an effort to detect neutrinos produced from the Big Bang. He's also a leading expert in the Standard Model of elementary particles and has spent three decades studying energy frontier particle colliders at Fermilab and CERN.

Title: Thermal neutrinos and the neutrino mass with PTOLEMY

Abstract: The detection of cosmic thermal neutrino backgrounds remains one of the foremost frontiers in astrophysics and particle physics.  The two known sources are core-collapse supernovae and the pre-nucleosynthesis epoch of the Big Bang.  A critical unknown underpins the predicted properties of these cosmic backgrounds: the absolute neutrino mass scale.  PTOLEMY is a pioneering experiment that aims to tackle a new regime of ultra-low neutrino masses, in which the mass signature from capture on nuclei is sub-dominant to the atomic and condensed-matter energy scales of the target materials.