Physics Research Conference

Neutrinos are some of the most fascinating particles that occur in nature. At least a billion times lighter than the proton, the neutrino was once thought to be massless and to travel at the speed of light. The Nobel-Prize winning discovery of neutrino oscillations told us that neutrinos have non-zero mass, which opens up the unique possibility of the neutrino being its own antiparticle, known as a Majorana fermion. This property could help explain the dominance of matter in our Universe. This talk will present new results of precision analyses and rare-event searches from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and from its successor experiment, SNO+, that help to define the limiting backgrounds for next-generation searches for Majorana neutrinos, and for dark matter. We will then discuss technological advances that could enable a new kind of large-scale neutrino experiment, with unprecedented physics reach.