Mysterious Neutrinos: Cosmology, Dark Matter, and Stellar Collapse

George Fuller (University of California San Diego)

October 13, 2016

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Abstract: Experiment has revealed many properties of neutrinos, but these particles remain mysterious in many ways. They are “”slippery””, e.g., able to escape from dense environments in the cosmos, but they can make up for their feeble interactions with huge numbers and thereby influence energetics and composition in compact objects and in the early universe. We will briefly review the frontier particle physics issues surrounding neutrinos. We then will discuss neutrino flavor and spin transformation in dense matter and how these processes might affect compact object physics and cosmological issues, e.g., sterile neutrino dark matter models.