F.C. Kohli Auditorium, Kanwal Rekhi Building (KReSIT), IIT Bombay
The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay is organizing an Institute Lecture on Wednesday, November 19, 2025.
The details of the Lecture are provided below:
Title: The nu Frontier: Current Challenges and Opportunities in Neutrino Physics
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Joachim Kopp, Institute of Physics, Theoretical High Energy Physics (THEP), Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz
The live screening of the lecture will be available at: https://www.youtube.com/IITBombayOfficialChannel
About the Speaker:
Joachim Kopp is a professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz who specializes in theoretical astroparticle physics. He obtained his PhD from the University of Heidelberg in 2009, then held research positions at Fermilab and Heidelberg, before coming to Mainz in 2014. From 2018 to 2025 he held a research staff position at CERN, where he led the theory activities of the CERN Neutrino Platform and the CERN Quantum Technology Initiative. Joachim is a leading expert in theoretical neutrino physics, has written influential papers on dark matter, and has carried out pioneering work on quantum sensing in astroparticle physics, especially in the context of gravitational wave science. In 2009, he was awarded the Otto Hahn Award of the German Max Planck Society, and in 2014 he won an ERC Starting Grant.
Speaker's webpage:
https://www.prisma.uni-mainz.de/professor-dr-joachim-kopp/
Abstract:
Neutrinos are among the most fascinating and mysterious particles in the Universe. They are incredibly abundant—trillions pass through our bodies every second—yet they interact so weakly with matter that they are notoriously difficult to detect. Despite this elusiveness, neutrinos have already transformed our understanding of nature: the discovery of neutrino oscillations showed that these particles have mass, a result that required physics beyond the original Standard Model of Particle Physics. Neutrinos have come a long way: once considered impossible to detect, they now take center stage in particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. In this colloquium, we highlight how precision neutrino physics is shaping our understanding of nature and how neutrinos have become versatile astrophysical messengers, but also how neutrinos can be a real nuisance in searches for other rare particle physics processes. Along the way, we highlight some of the theoretical challenges we face in modern neutrino physics.