Session E02: Special Session for the Sakurai, Panofsky, and Primakoff Award Winners

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he last three letters of Super-Kamiokande famously allow interpretation as either Neutrino Detection Experiment or Nucleon Decay Experiment. When Super-Kamiokande began in 1996, it was surely going to observe atmospheric neutrino oscillation if nature kindly provided it (as well as solar neutrino mixing or a galactic supernova). Likewise, Super-Kamiokande was poised to quickly outstrip the previous generation of underground experiments in the search for proton decay and related baryon number violating processes. In this talk I will review how we have sifted through more than 20 years and 50000 events of atmospheric neutrinos looking for the tell-tale signs of Grand Unification or other new physics.   

Live

Earth's atmosphere is bombarded by an isotropic flux of cosmic rays, primarily protons, which extend to very high energies. These primary cosmic rays interact with the components of the atmosphere and produce mesons, which in turn decay, to produce so called, atmospheric neutrinos. The first experiments to observe these neutrinos reported results in 1965. The detection was via the muons that are produced by the neutrino's nuclear interaction. The first hint of a discrepancy between the number of neutrinos expected and what was observed appeared in these results. The experimental situation remained controversial until the Super-Kamiokande experiment was built and reported data in 1998. The experiments large data samples made it possible to finely bin the events in energy and direction, which finally provided definitive proof of the deficit.   

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I will review some surprising connections between scattering amplitudes in quantum field theory, used to predict the outcomes of particle experiments, and the positive geometry. The most prominent example concerns gluon scattering amplitudes in maximally supersymmetric extension of quantum chromodynamics, which can be calculated as volume of the Amplituhedron. I will show some of the recent developments and open challenges and I will further speculate where this research can possibly lead us in the new understanding of fundamental physical laws.   

Live

I will give an overview of the exciting discoveries at hadron colliders of the weak bosons, top-quark, and Higgs boson, the ways that these discoveries were made, and their theoretical implications.