The Standard Model of Particle Physics. Neutrino Oscillations

TL;DR

This paper reviews the Standard Model's validation through high-energy experiments, focusing on neutrino oscillations which reveal neutrino masses and challenge conservation laws, summarizing key experimental findings and open questions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of neutrino oscillation evidence and its implications within the Standard Model, highlighting recent experimental results and unresolved issues.

Findings

Neutrino oscillations imply neutrino masses.

Experiments confirm neutrino flavor changes.

Cosmology constrains total neutrino mass.

Abstract

The Standard Model (SM) of Particle Physics was tested to great precision by experiments at the highest energy colliders (LEP, Hera, Tevatron, SLAC). The only missing particle is the Higgs boson, which will be the first particle to be searched for at the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The SM anticipated that there are 3 types of left handed neutrinos. Experiments on atmospheric and solar neutrinos (made in Japan, Italy, Canada, Russia and the US) have shown the existence of neutrino oscillations, which imply that neutrinos have very small mass differences and violate the conservation of individual leptonic numbers. Neutrino oscillations were verified in long baseline neutrino experiments (in Japan and in the USA); and cosmology has given reasonably precise indications on the sum of the neutrino masses. In this general lecture will be summarized some of the main properties of the SM and some of the main results obtained in the field and the experiments in preparation. Some of the main open questions will be briefly discussed.