SIGNATURES FROM PHYSICS BEYOND THE STANDARD MODEL

Abstract

A brief review is made of some of the experimental signatures that may be associated to a certain class of extensions of the standard model. The material of these lectures is divided into two sections. After briefly sketching the present observational status of the neutrino masses I consider various schemes of neutrino mass generation, including those which are motivated by present experimental hints from solar and atmospheric neutrinos, as well as cosmological data on the amplitude of primordial density fluctuations. Then some of the physics motivations and potential of various extensions of the standard model related to the electroweak breaking sector, such as supersymmetry, and extensions of the gauge boson sector are reviewed. The new signatures associated with both types of extension may all be accessible to experiments performed either at accelerators or at underground installations. The complementarity between these two approaches in the search for signals beyond the standard model is most vividly manifest in the field of neutrino physics.