“Nuclear Physics for Neutrinos, Dark Matter and more” — Dr. Saori Pastore, Los Alamos National Lab
Friday, Jan 26, 2018 at 2pm in P-148
ABSTRACT: Next-generation experiments are poised to explore lepton-number violation, discern the neutrino mass hierarchy, understand the particle nature of dark matter, and answer other fundamental questions aimed at testing the validity and extent of the standard model. Nuclear uncertainties constitute an obstacle to these discoveries. To describe nuclear properties I work within the microscopic or ab initio approach. In the microscopic description of nuclei one assumes that all nuclear phenomena can be explained in terms of interactions between nucleons (protons and neutrons), and interactions between external probes (e.g, electrons, photons, neutrinos, dark matter…) with nucleons, nucleon-pairs, nucleon-triplets and so on, referred to as nuclear many-body currents.
In this talk, I will review recent progress in microscopic calculations of electroweak properties of nuclei,
with emphasis on recent studies that address the “gA problem” in single beta decays, and the impact of many-body effects and lepton-number violating potentials in neutrinoless double-beta decay matrix elements. I will present a novel framework to calculate electron- and neutrino-nucleus scattering cross sections relevant to neutrino-oscillation experiments, and discuss future developments of these studies.