For the last week or so the Higgs has been hitting the headlines, but it's also been an amazing year in the world of neutrinos, and last month, a group of us from Imperial attended the Neutrino 2012 conference in Kyoto, which is where the whole community comes together to report and discuss our work, and think about the future.
This was the 25th in the Neutrino series of conferences, which are held every other year and are the biggest and most prestigious in the field of neutrinos. In 2014 it will be held jointly by Boston University, Harvard, MIT and Tufts, and in 2016 it will be those of us here at Imperial College London who will be hosting*. We have already started making plans for 2016, so this year at Kyoto, my colleagues and I were thinking not just about the physics, but also the logistics of the conference, the good things we encountered, and any issues that we might be able to improve when it is our turn:
Anyway, this year, over 600 physicists participated, making it the best attended Neutrino conference ever, and the physics results from the past two years that were reported are really reshaping our view of the Universe and also how we should perform experiments in the future to learn even more.
Here are some pictures of Kyoto as found in slides shown by some of the speakers during the conference:
And finally, one of the most beautiful slides of all:
Well,
one last photo that is not
quite as pretty:
Overall, it was a fabulous conference, with all sorts of ideas sprouting forward from the community on the sorts of things we can do next to take the next steps forward—many of these will result in new experiments, and many will result in new interpretations for previous and current experiments, including these ones we are working on here at Imperial.
The big question with the Higgs and the LHC is “are we seeing something beyond the Standard Model”, but in neutrinos we've been looking well beyond the Standard Model, and now that we
actually know all three mixing angles, it may not be long before we uncover a few more fundamental mysteries of the Universe....
*which is to say the Neutrino conferences from now till then are following me round the world!
