Science at the Shine Dome 2010
New Fellows Seminar
Wednesday 5 May
Professor Raymond Volkas FAA
School of Physics, University of Melbourne
Raymond Volkas received his BSc (Hons) in 1982, and his PhD in 1987, both from the University of Melbourne. He was a Queen Elizabeth II Fellow from 1990-1992 at the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne, and was appointed lecturer there in 1993. In the second half of 1994 he was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and a senior visitor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge. He was promoted to professor in 2003. His general research fields are theoretical particle physics, early-universe cosmology and high-energy astrophysics. He specialises in building theoretical models extending the standard model of particle physics. The goal is to try to understand some of the mysteries of fundamental particles and the universe at large that the standard theory is unable to explain.
Neutrinos and new laws of physics
Neutrinos are among the most elusive of elementary particles as they interact very weakly with ordinary matter. They are also stable, or very nearly stable, and they are thought to fill the universe as remnants from one second after the ‘big bang’. Using neutrinos, one can probe deep inside stars and learn about conditions so early in the life of the universe that stable atoms had yet to form. It was once thought that neutrinos were exactly massless, and hence always travelled at the speed of light. But experiment has recently proven that neutrinos have mass, through their observed ability to transform or oscillate from one type into another using the laws of quantum physics. So neutrinos have already revealed that the standard theory of particle physics is incomplete and must be extended. What else could they teach us?
