Andrea Pocar (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Date: Thu. March 31st, 2022, 4:00 pm-5:00 pmLocation: Via Zoom
The Borexino Legacy – A Personal Account
Borexino is a large neutrino experiment that contributed ground-breaking measurements of solar and other low-energy neutrinos, thanks to a combination of conceptual simplicity, technical ingenuity, and persistence of almost epical proportions. After almost 15 years of operation at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Italy, Borexino ended its data taking on October 4, 2021.
In this talk, I will summarize the main science results of Borexino, which include the measurement of all neutrinos emitted by the Sun (solar neutrinos) and of those emitted by the beta radioactivity of the Earth (geo-neutrinos). I will highlight the technical innovations Borexino introduced to the field of rare-event physics and accompany the presentation with less-known anecdotes that illustrate the day-to-day challenges encountered in building the most radio-clean neutrino detector to date, against the paradigm of the time.
The talk is offered as a personal journey in neutrino physics and aspires to be of interest to graduate students and to the broad departmental community, with the inclusion of accounts of events that many might find to resonate with their own experience.
Host: Pavel Fileviez Perez