2019

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Jacobo López Pavón

Jacobo López Pavón

https://inspirehep.net/authors/1050355?ui-citation-summary=true

ResearchID

ORCID

jacobo.lopez@uv.es

Affiliation: Instituto de Física Corpuscular (IFIC), CSIC-Universitat de València

Fields or areas of research Theoretical Particle Physics: Neutrino Physics and implications in Cosmology, matter-antimatter asymmetry, collider physics and Astroparticle Physics

I obtained my PhD at the "Instituto de Física Teórica" (IFT) UAM-CSIC in Madrid (Spain, 2010). After that, I have done several Post-docs at the IPPP-Durham University (United Kingdom, 2010-2012), SISSA-Trieste (Italy, 2012-2015), INFN "Sezione di Genova" (Italy, 2015-2016) and CERN (Switzerland, 2016-2018) as a fellow. Since 2019 I enjoy a Junior position at the IFIC UV-CSIC (Spain). My research is mainly focused on theoretical and phenomenological aspects of neutrinos physics and I have, thus, chosen the IFIC because is a reference institution in this field, both at the theoretical and experimental level.

My work aims to answer a fundamental question: how are the neutrino masses generated? Five years ago the physics Nobel prize was awarded to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald "for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass". This breakthrough requires the Standard Model of particle physics to be extended so as to accommodate the neutrino masses observed in oscillation experiments. Indeed, the neutrino masses are much smaller than the masses of any other known elementary particle, which suggests the existence of a mass generation mechanism different from the Higgs field able to explain this fact. Furthermore, the origin of light neutrino masses could very well be connected to the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry in our universe or even to the Dark Matter problem.

Ultimately, the main motivation of my work is the quest for the fundamental underlying theory able to answer all these open questions. Data from diverse sources as cosmological observations, neutrino oscillation experiments, particle accelerators or neutrinoless double beta decay experiments, may provide the smoking gun and should all be combined to probe for this fundamental theory beyond the Standard Model.

People associated with the project as predoctoral research staff: 2 (2019-2020) + 1 (2021-2022) funded by my project+ 1 funded by "La Caixa INPhINIT" program

People associated with the project as technical support staff: 1 (5 meses)