Carlos Peña Garay, the Director of the Canfranc Underground Laboratory and Chair of the AstroParticle Physics European Consortium
is the next invited speaker of the Wigner Colloquia. The title of his lecture is Gauge symmetries and the search for the unknown.
Place of the colloquia: Building 1, meeting room
Date: 4 March 2025, 14 p.m.
The lecture can also be followed on Zoom:
https://wigner-hu.zoom.us/j/84449381616?pwd=AVQz2S5hDN4gLKnZAr8jeeafciL…
Meeting ID: 844 4938 1616
Passcode: 843929
The lecturer's short biography:
Carlos Peña Garay is currently the Director of the Canfranc Underground Laboratory and Chair of the AstroParticle Physics European Consortium.
He has made major contributions in Astroparticle Physics. In the 1998-2003 period, he contributed to the solution of the Solar Neutrino Problem, which led to the observation of neutrino oscillations and the discovery of the neutrino mass. In 1999, he and his collaborators were the first to show the correct solution to the SNP, dubbed the large mixing angle solution. Since 2003, Carlos Peña Garay y collaborators have written influential works on the solar neutrino research roadmap to verify the existence of CNO solar neutrinos, first observed by Borexino experiment, and to solve the solar abundances problem. He has research contributions in several areas of Astroparticle Physics, including very high energy neutrinos observed by IceCUBE, low energy positrons observed in the galaxy, neutrino-less double beta decay and dark matter searches. He has explored the properties of neutrinos and dark matter in Cosmology, identifying observables with potential to discover the cosmic neutrino background, the lowest energy neutrinos in nature. Carlos Peña Garay is currently searching for axions in microwave resonant coupled cavities, a solution to the strong CP problem and a well-motivated dark matter candidate, and leads the Spanish contribution to the construction of Hyper-Kamiokande, a very large water Cerenkov detector aiming at discovering CP-violation in the lepton sector, among other discovery goals.
Abstract:
Two pieces of physics, allowed by the gauge symmetries of the interactions in the Standard Model of Particle Physics, are still missing: axions and neutrino Majorana mass. These components of the fundamental physics description may address basic questions on the history and composition of the Universe as the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry and the nature of dark matter. I will briefly discuss the current status on the searches for dark matter in the form of axions and the roadmap to discover the nature of neutrinos, which includes the discovery of CP violation in the lepton sector and the first observation of the neutrinoless double beta decay, necessary conditions to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry observed in the Universe.
