A Talk on ‘The Neutrino Odyssey: From an impossible dream to the unreachable stars’ by Professor Srubabati Goswami

ABOUT THE TALK

Wolfgang Pauli proposed the existence of a particle devoid of electric charge and mass to explain the conservation of energy in nuclear beta decay. This elusive, electrically neutral particle, later christened the “neutrino” by Enrico Fermi, was detected almost three decades later by Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines. Since then, neutrino physics has remained an active area of research, offering insights into physics beyond our established ideas. Neutrinos also carry information from distant stars. This talk will trace the journey of the neutrino, from Pauli’s once-impossible dream to the observation of neutrinos from unreachable stars, culminating in the state-of-the-art ICECUBE detector at the South Pole.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Professor Srubabati Goswami is a Senior Professor of Theoretical High Energy Physics at the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, specializing in particle and astroparticle physics. She is an elected fellow of all three science academies in the country — IAS, INSA, and NAS — as well as The World Academy of Sciences. She has received several prestigious awards, including the Humboldt Fellowship and the J C Bose Fellowship. She is a strong advocate for women in science and previously chaired the Gender in Physics working group of the Indian Physics Association, which developed the Hyderabad Charter for Gender Equity in Physics.