338 | Ryan Patterson on the Physics of Neutrinos

In this episode of the Mindscape podcast, host Sean Carroll interviews Ryan Patterson, an experimental particle physicist at Caltech, about neutrinos. Carroll and Patterson discuss the basics of neutrinos, including their unique properties, such as only interacting via the weak force, their abundance in the universe, and the different flavors of neutrinos. They delve into the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation, which implies that neutrinos have mass and can transform from one flavor to another. Patterson explains how experiments like DUNE aim to measure neutrino properties, including CP violation, which could help explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. They also touch on the possibility of sterile neutrinos as dark matter candidates and the challenges of detecting the cosmic neutrino background.