O MISTÉRIO DO FÍSICO DESAPARECIDO

Informação recebida do Departamento de Física da Universidade de Coimbra:

Café com Física

Estão todos convidados para a próxima abertura do Café com Física na Sala de Conferências, terça-feira 6 de Outubro, às 14h, onde o convidado é

Juan Jose Gómez Cadenas (Univ. Valencia, Espanha)

falará sobre

"Ettore Majorana meets his shadow"

Every body knows that science, like poetry, is one step short from madness. Ettore Majorana was one of the greatest sicentists of the XXth century and also ond of the most tragic figures. In 1938 he disapeared in the sea. His body was never found. Before vanishing he had postulated that the neutrino, the misterious particle invented by Wolfang Pauli and christianed by Enrico Fermi a few years before, was its own antiparticle.

A particle that is its own antiparticle reminds of a man who can't be distinguished from his own shadow. The neutrino, perhaps the tiniest bit of reality we can dream of, is still, more than 80 years after its conception to the world of ideas, as misterious as the Majorana himself.

Did Majorana die in the sea? Some scientists - some poets - prefer to think that he didn't and he lives still, retired from the World, in some remote and forgotten haven. Perhaps we will never know, but instead we may find wether the neutrino is its own antiparticle, by detecting neutrinoless double beta decay events. Those processes, whose lifetime is many orders of magnitude longer than that of the universe may hold the key to the question of the nature of the neutrino, and by extension help us to understand the cosmic asymmetry between matter and antimatter. The NEXT experiment, largely an Iberian collaboration will be one of the key knights to bring light into this fundamental question, perhaps the one to answer if Ettore Majorana will, at the long last, meet his shadow.