Answering the big questions about Neutrinos

Dr. Steve Elliott is a world-leading researcher whose work has been at the center of the discovery of the neutrino?s mass, one of the most important discoveries in fundamental physics in the past several decades. A Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow, Elliott?s primary research interests are in nuclear and particle physics with an emphasis on neutrino properties. 

A Neutrino Day 2015 guest speaker, Elliott?s talk is titled, ?Neutrinos, Anti-Neutrinos and the Question, ?Why are we Here??? In his presentation, Elliott discusses the connections between matter, antimatter, neutrino mass and double beta decay. And it all started with Dr. Ray Davis?s solar neutrino experiment, which was built in 1965 at the Homestake Gold Mine and ran for three decades. 

The spokesperson for the Majorana Demonstrator Project at Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, S.D., Elliott graduated from the University of New Mexico with honors. He attended the University of California at Irvine where his dissertation documented the first observation of two-neutrino double beta decay. He was a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory where he worked on a solar neutrino experiment in Russia (SAGE). He then went to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a postdoc where he worked on ion trapping. As a member of the research faculty at the University of Washington, he worked on a solar neutrino experiment in Canada (SNO).

After returning to Los Alamos National Laboratory, Elliott again focused his research on double beta decay, working with the Majorana Demonstrator Project. He is the author/co-author of more than 300 journal papers and proceedings totaling more than 18,000 citations. His primary research interest concerns the properties of the neutrino. He lives in Santa Fe, N.M., with his wife, Mary, and daughter, Alexis.