Neutrinos: The Big Question and Physics Opportunities

Abstract

This article summarises a talk given at the 2014 Palermo workshop on Astrophysics. It covers a short review on the neutrino physics status and the potential physics opportunities of future experiments. During the last year our knowledge on the neutrino oscillation parameter $\sin^2\theta_{13}$ improved dramatically, and the large value opened the way to oscillation experiments sensitive to possible CP-violation. The first high-energetic neutrinos in the TeV range were detected in the IceCube experiment, while the Planck collaboration set further limits on the number of active neutrinos from cosmological constraints. Over the next years the Katrin will investigate the beta decay of Tritium to study the absolute neutrino mass scale, while new experiments will investigate the potential sterile neutrino scenario which could explain the event excess of the MiniBooNE and LSND experiment.