Prof. N K Mondal

About the Speaker:

Naba K Mondal is currently a Senior Professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He was associated with pioneering Kolar Gold Field (KGF) Proton Decay Experiment. In 1991 he joined the international collaboration experiment called DZERO and was involved in the important discovery of top quark. He is also involved with the CMS experiment at CERN, Geneva. Currently he is leading a team of physicists and engineers from several research institutes in India for setting up an underground laboratory in India for carrying out front ranking experiments in the field of neutrino physics. He is a fellow

Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore and National Academy of Sciences Allahabad . This year he was awarded the J.C.Bose National Fellowship by the dept of Science and Technology, Govt. of India.

TITLE:

Neutrinos- A New Window To The Universe

Abstract:

Neutrinos, "the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being", as quoted by its co-discoverer Frederick Reines, never ceased to puzzle physicists.

Wolfgang Pauli introduced neutrino in 1930 as a desperate remedy to save the "Law Of Consevation Of Energy". It then took 27 long years to find the first experimental evidence for its existence. The reason for this long wait is its extreme reluctance to interact with matter. Neutrino can pass through the Earth, the Sun or other Astrophysical objects without much interaction. They interact at the best only one time over one billion in the huge apparatus built to detect them. This particular property of neutrino however turns out to be a blessing in disguise as it opens up a new window to look at the interior of sun and other astrophysical objects.

Over the last several decades, dedicated neutrino experiments around the globe have a looked for neutrinos from the sun, from outer spaceb, from interior of the earth and from man made activities. These experiments have answered many of the questions related to particle physics, astro physics and even geophysics.

India has a long tradition in neutrino physics. In fact,  the first ever cosmic ray produced neutrino was detected in an experiment in the deep mines of Kolar Gold Fields in 1965. India is again planning to setup an experiment called India-Based Neutrino Observatory (NIO) to study some of the properties of neutrinos. 

In this talk i will describe few of these experiments and their findings. I will also discuss the INO experiment and its physics potential.